Pasolini and the Religion of His Time

“Yet, Church, to you I came. / Pascal and the songs of the Greeks / tightly in my hand, ardent, as if // the quiet farmhand mystery / deaf in the summer of forty-three / between the village, the vines and the shore // of the Tagliamento, were at the center / of earth and sky; and there, throat, heart and stomach // torn apart on the distant path / of the Fonde, I spent the hours / of the most beautiful human time, the whole // my day of youth, in loves / whose sweetness still brings me tears… / Among the scattered books, a few blue // flowers, and the grass, the clean grass / among the sagebrush, I gave to Christ / all my naivety and my blood.”

You may have recognized in this translation  lines taken from the poem La religione del mio tempo (The Religion of My Time). They are the opening lines of a virulent invective against the Catholic Church, an invective that concludes with the words “La Chiesa / è lo spietato cuore dello Stato” (The Church / is the merciless heart of the State). In the violence of his invective, Pasolini could not help but recall the years of his youth in Friuli, when he was seized by a sort of religious rapture. Later, speaking of the religion of his time, he compared the Christianity of the simple farm hands of Friuli with the paganism of the young people of the Roman suburbs, a  Rome where, with regard to the religion of his time, he found himself having to reckon with “the pious landowners,” “vile pupils of a corrupt Jesus.”

Two contrasting elements coexisted within Pasolini’s personality. On the one hand, there was  a religiosity of an instinctive, formless kind, far from the systematization based on  the dogmas of Christianity understood as an institutional religion; on the other hand, as a son of his time, he could not help but rationalize all of this. At one and the same time he lived through two opposing moments, which he took up in The Religion of My Time: “How far he has come from the tumults / purely interior in his heart, / and from the landscape of primroses and virgulae // of maternal Friuli, the Nightingale / sweetheart of the Catholic Church!”

His invective also recalls  his debut as an author of a book of  Italian verse  that complemented his production in the Friulian dialect. The book of verse is, as all Italians know, L’usignolo della Chiesa Cattolica (The Nightingale of the Catholic Church). Pasolini is a poet who revealed  everything about himself in his poems. He was a multiform artist because he expressed himself not only in different linguistic styles, but also in cinema and other artistic forms, including painting, in which he displayed  some expertise. Now, within this multiple production, I would not like us to lose sight of the fact that the central part of his work, the most serious and profound  part at the same time, is poetry, and I would say above all that collected in the volumes entitled Le ceneri di Gramsci (Gramsci’s Ashes), La religione del mio tempo (The Religion of My Time), Poesia in forma di rosa (Poetry in the Form of a Rose), they contain, in addition to short poems, long compositions,  poems in which he lays bare his conscience.

To communicate this  aspect, which I consider central to his activity as an artist and as a poet, I need only quote a few lines from Gramsci’s Ashes, when he imagines being in the English cemetery, in front of Antonio Gramsci’s tomb, and says: “The scandal of contradicting myself, of being / with you and against you; with you in the heart, / in the light, against you in the darkest recesses.” Note the use of “and” in an  adversative sense it is, from this central element  of Pasolini’s poetic expressiveness, from this contrast intimately experienced and sincerely expressed, that the most typical aspect of his verse is born: the oxymoron, or the use of the word “and” understood not as a conjunction, but as a disjunction, as occurs in the titles of some of his books: Passione e ideologia, Trasumanar e organizzar (Passion and ideology, Transhumanize and Organize). Passion is the opposite of ideology and ideology is the opposite of passion: the conjunction “and” connects and at the same time contrasts the two elements in a sort of coincidentia oppositorum that is the core from which Pasolini’s poetic activity was born.

At the basis of this contradiction is an internal conflict between an irrational element and the attempts to rationalize this element. This situation and concept are expressed very effectively in the prologue to the film Medea, where Jason’s education is illustrated. It is the Centaur who educates the young Jason. When Jason is still a child, the Centaur appears in his traditional form, that is, half man and half horse, and tells him: “Everything is holy, everything is holy, everything is holy. There is nothing natural in nature, keep this in mind; when nature seems natural to you, everything will be over and something else will begin: goodbye sky, goodbye sea.” This is the sacred Centaur explaining to Jason as a child  the sense of reality. However, when Jason starts to grow, the Centaur in front of him is no longer the mythical figure of the half-man, half-horse, but simply a man, albeit an eccentric one (acted by Laurent Terzieff), as are characters in ancient tragedies, who says: “The things that man, in discovering agriculture, has seen in cereals, the things that you have learned from this relationship, the things you have understood from the example of the seeds that lose their form underground and are then reborn, all of this has been the definitive lesson.” This is a very learned Centaur, because he is quoting a modern author,   Mircea Eliade, who wrote a famous treatise on the history of religions. The Centaur continues: “Resurrection, my dear, but now this definitive lesson is of no use; what you see in the grains, what you intend from the rebirth of the seeds is meaningless to you as a distant memory that no longer concerns you. For there is no god.” So the same Centaur, who had said to the child, “Everything is holy,” when the child has grown, says to him, “What I taught you was useful in the ancient world, but now, in this modern world, it is no longer useful.”

This happens at the beginning of the film, and will also happen in another film Pasolini dedicated to an ancient tragedy, Oedipus Rex. Pasolini made films of the two Greek tragedies, Medea and Oedipus Rex. Both are split in half, because the first part is dedicated to the antecedents of the tragedy, then, halfway through the film, which has developed in the manner of silent cinema, we move on to the actual tragedy, based on the texts of Sophocles (Oedipus Rex) and Euripides (Medea). In the gap between the preliminary events and the tragedy of  Medea we see Jason in Corinth, in the middle of the city, meeting the Centaur. By now he is a grown man. He is no longer neither  the child nor the boy of the past and he experiences  the joy of seeing in front of him his ancient master. Instead  of seeing one, however, he sees two, that is, he sees at the same time the mythical centaur, half man and half horse, who does not speak and, next to him, the centaur who is only a man, who instead speaks. Jason says in surprise: “But I have only known one centaur.” The Centaur replies: “No. You have known two: one sacred, when you were a child, and one deconsecrated, when you became an adult, but what is sacred is preserved next to its new, deconsecrated form. Here we are, side by side.” To Jason, who asks questions on which I will not dwell, the Centaur gives the definitive explanation, clarifying the meaning of this duality, because “nothing could prevent the old Centaur from inspiring feelings and me, the new Centaur, from expressing them.”

So in poetry, especially in Pasolini’s adult poetry, we find forced coexistence, the friction between these two contrary elements confronting each other, clashing, and it is from this conflict that Pasolini’s poetry is born. In Pasolini’s life, understood over extended periods, we can see a kind of pendular motion, because it is clear that when he was in Friuli in the 1940s, and he wrote poems both in Italian and poems in Friulian, he lived under the sign of the sacred Centaur, so he lived in an irrational phase of his life as an artist and a poet. Then he moved to Rome, in a completely new situation. Here we can imagine the pendulum shifting from a period of irrationality toward the rational. This spanned the entire period of the 1950s, characterized in particular by the work of the editors of the magazine, Officina, who tried to rationalize the irrational. When Pasolini leaves literature and dedicates himself to cinema, at first only believing in it up to a certain point, but then becoming more and more involved in it, it is evident that a previous system (the project of rationalizing even the irrational) begins to crumble.

Discovering cinema at the age of 40, after having devoted 20 years to literature, Pasolini believed he had found a new technique to express the same things he had said before. He was surprised at the first results. He realized that cinematographic technique is much simpler than literary technique. Inexperienced in cinema (i.e. ignorant of its technical aspects), when he began to shoot his first film, Accattone, he decided to focus on  this simplicity as much as possible, reducing it to its essentials. The result was a style that he himself defined as “sacred.” Pasolini spoke of “technical sacredness” to indicate the effects of Masaccio-like chiaroscuro obtained with Ferrania film and Franco Citti’s close-ups, shot against the light, which gave the film’s protagonist the rough and solemn appearance of a Romanesque or Gothic sculpture. For Pasolini, the poet, all this represented a strong shift from the rationality of the 1950s toward the irrationality of the 1940s, if one can express it in this way, schematically applying the movement  of the pendulum.

Pasolini’s first three films (Accattone, Mamma Roma, La ricotta) may seem, especially if viewed from a distance as we do now, to be necessary  steps on a path that leads to The Gospel According to St. Matthew. In reality, things were more complicated than they seem today. That path was not a linear one, but rather a zigzag journey through many contradictions, on which I will not dwell.

In 1958, Pius XII died and was succeeded by John XXIII, who opened a new phase in relations between the Church and the world. In Assisi there was an institution, Pro Civitate Christiana, which, according to the intentions of its founder, Don Giovanni Rossi, offered itself as a meeting place for Christians and others who wished to establish relationships based on mutual collaboration and dialogue. In October 1962 Pasolini came to Assisi as a guest of the Pro Civitate Christiana on the occasion of a conference on cinema, attended by personalities from the entertainment world. Although Pasolini did not participate by speaking at the conference, his presence did not go unnoticed and caused some surprise.

To find out how things went, we need to take a step back. Lucio Settimio Caruso (1931-2013) was the Pro Civitate volunteer in charge of organizing the annual meetings of filmmakers in Assisi. Don Giovanni Rossi called him one day and asked him point-blank: “In your opinion, who among film directors is the one who is farthest from religion?” Caruso answered on the spur of the moment: “Pasolini.” “Go find him,” responded Don Giovanni, “and bring him here.” Caruso knew little about Pasolini, except for the terrible reputation that surrounded him, thanks to a persistent campaign of denigration by newspapers that at the time called themselves independent. He read his books, saw his films, and was enthusiastic about them. He struck up a relationship with Pasolini which, after overcoming initial mistrust, became increasingly cordial and resulted in the hospitality accorded to the director at the Cittadella in Assisi, which coincided, among other things, with John XXIII’s pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Loreto and the tomb of St. Francis in view of the imminent opening of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council.

The Pasolini who arrived in Assisi in October 1962 was a man in crisis. To say that Pasolini was a man in crisis is a banal turn of phrase , because Pasolini had always been in crisis from the moment he was born. As a man who always revealed  everything about himself, he also had this to say: “My crisis is not the crisis of a day, a month, or a year; I live in a state of perennial and insoluble crisis.” As for the crisis Pasolini felt at the time he arrived in Assisi (a crisis that had private and public, personal and collective, cultural and social aspects), it is enough to read the verses he wrote at that time, later collected in the volume Poetry in the Form of a Rose. I will not go into the circumstances that gave him the idea of making a film about the Gospel. I will limit myself to quoting a few lines from a letter written by the director to the producer Alfredo Bini: “As a writer born out of the Resistance, as a Marxist, etc., for all of the 1950s my ideological work was toward rationality, in contrast with the irrationalism of the decadent literature which had formed me and which I loved so much. The idea of making a film on the Gospel and its technical aspects  is instead, I must confess, the result of a furious irrationalist wave. I want to make a pure work of poetry, perhaps risking the dangers of aesthetics. All this dangerously puts my entire writing career back on the line, I know. But it would be nice if, loving Matthew’s Christ so devotedly,  I were then afraid of putting something back into play.”

Pasolini said he was a Marxist and not a believer. His decision to make a film based on the first of the four Gospels, that of Matthew, to be interpreted literally, refusing interpolations and interpretations, in addition to expressing an attitude of respect toward the sacred text, also indicates his desire to maintain a certain distance from the content of the text itself. “This is what Matthew says,” Pasolini seems to suggest, “and I limit myself to reporting what he says.” Moreover, the director had initially decided to shoot the film with the same technical methods he had adopted for his first film: simplicity, frontality, hieraticism, sacredness…

In a self-critical essay entitled Technical Confessions, the director indicated  the reasons why he could not make the Gospel in the same style as Accattone. Only when filming began did he realize he had set out on the wrong path and suddenly decided to change direction. He left the technical sacredness of Accattone and embraced “magma”, which is the stylistic signature of The Gospel. In order to justify this course of action in retrospect, he says that he realized that if he had shot the film with the inner attitude of a non-believer, he would have made an insincere work and therefore inert in terms of artistic expression. He therefore had to invent a hypothetical believer who would lend him a sincere point of view on the facts as narrated by Matthew. The film feeds on the conflict between the non-believing Pasolini and the hypothetical believer he had to invent in order not to be insincere. This conflict manifests itself in the style of the film. It is perhaps the only time in which the style of a film, modified and reshaped during the course of the work, gives an account, as a seismograph would, of the inner conflict faced by its director  with regard to a problem concerning faith. For me, this conflict manifests, on Pasolini’s part, the desire to remain outside a view of faith, and at the same time the impossibility of not entering into it.

Pasolini’s personal involvement in the making of The Gospel According to Matthew is attested by the almost unlimited number of choices he had to make during the feverish hours of filming: that face, that slant of light, that glimpse of landscape… The film was received with lively interest and aroused great discussion. One of these discussions (which could not help but involve Pasolini himself) concerned the degree of autonomy that the director had been able to enjoy in relation to the priests to whom he himself had turned to obtain their theological advice. There is a part in the film that Pasolini himself considered illustrative with regard to the Gospel. Once I had the opportunity to see the film with him again, in February 1968, at the end of the screening he told me that, if he could, he would have eliminated two scenes that followed, relating to two miracles: the multiplication of the loaves and fishes and Jesus walking on water. At the same time he affirmed that, apart from some marginal aspects, the film was entirely his.

The dramatic climax of the film is represented by the scene of the crucifixion, seen through the Madonna. The mother of Jesus was played, as is well known, by Susanna Colussi, Pasolini’s mother. The tragedy that indelibly marked Susanna’s life was the death of Guido, Pier Paolo’s younger brother, a partisan killed by other partisans in the mountains of Friuli in February 1945. According to the testimony of those who were present on the set, Pasolini prepared his mother to interpret the scene of the Madonna’s delirium at the foot of the cross by telling her several times, “Remember Guido!”

In other words, he wanted Susanna to repeat the same experience of pain, brought to the climax, that she had experienced when she received the news of her son’s death. During the filming of The Gospel, Pasolini had begun to move the camera with his hands. The objective images of Our Lady, which accompany the movements of his mother’s  delirium up to the point of touching the blades of grass on the lawn where Susanna collapsed, were made personally by the director, who could in no way have obtained such a result by giving orders to a cameraman. Similarly, the subjective images of the raising of the cross, seen through the trembling eyes of the mother, who shakes her head, trembles on her bended knees, and falls under the unbearable weight of what her eyes see, were also created. The scene concludes with a black screen. The viewer is deprived of the possibility of seeing what sight cannot bear.

Pasolini certainly had many reasons for making his film on the Gospel of Matthew, but it is hard to imagine that among the many reasons there was one that mattered more to him than the one he fully expressed in the scene just recalled,  the intention to compensate in some way his mother for the unspeakable pain she had suffered and still suffered from Guido’s death, a pain that was renewed in the many difficult moments of Pier Paolo’s life and that would have closure on November 2, 1975, when Susanna’s life, now reduced to pure survival, would be definitively identified with the image of the Mater Dolorosa.

DOI: La Civiltà Cattolica, En. Ed. Vol. 6, no.4 art. 5, 0422: 10.32009/22072446.0422.5