The Sin Eater (Rant 101)

Here is the wittiest and shortest film review ever. Of an obscure B-movie entitled ‘The Thirteen Victims of Dr Caligari’. Readers were laconically informed by a waggish Viennese critic: ‘I have been the fourteenth’.



Brian Helgeland’s just released The Sin Eater might provoke a similar reaction. Wretched script, indifferent direction, risible special effects and barely passable acting (I fancy what a magnetic Jude Law would have made of Heath Ledger’s bromide Fr Alex’s role) – do I make myself clear? Despite all that, the concept is stimulating. Very. The film’s subject – death, love, sin & salvation – turned me on all right.



Anglo-Welsh folklore witnesses to the past existence of sin eaters – men who ‘devoured’ the unatoned sins of a dying person, arguably easing his admission into eternity. Crudeness of the imagery apart (plus minor unanswered questions: did gorging oneself on another’s sins entail no unpleasant side-effects at all for the eater?), I figure sin-eaters must have felt a pretty caring lot - a bit like charity workers, analysts and counsellors these more enlightened days. They provided a service to consumers, or ‘more choice’, as Tony Blair would say. The main grumblers must have been the clergy. Which closed shop likes outside competition? Surely excommunications and anathemas must have been hurled at sin eaters thick and fast. Maybe they just gobbled those up as well, quite likely.



The modern problem with sin-eating of course is neither heresy nor grossness nor even silliness – sins, though terribly real, are not the sort of stuff anyone could ingest, anymore than thoughts and feelings could be – but sociology. A permissive society cares no more about sinful vices than it does about the virtues of virginity or fasting or, I fear, God. The word ‘sin’, when not used metaphorically or jocularly, is almost an archaism. And the Church is complicit in this attitude. ‘We hardly ever speak of sin here’, a chap called Alastair, the Vice-Principal of my Church of England very liberal theological college, once noted - approvingly. Ditto for our Beard-in-Chief, Archbishop Rowan Williams. How astounding it was to hear a Muslim cleric, Dr Bahmanpour, recently affirm in the Maida Vale mosque: ‘When we speak of tolerance, we must specify that we cannot tolerate sin.’ Is the Mosque teaching the Church, I wonder? A funny idea, coming from a priest!



The unhappy scapegoat of Leviticus XVI, upon which Aaron first laid the sins of the Jewish people and then drove into the wilderness to be devoured by the demon Azazel, I suppose, is a remote Old Covenant antecedent of the rite of sin-eating. As to the New Testament, we have it from Hebrews IX:28 that ‘Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many…’ Geddit?



Ahem, Fr Frank, this stuff is pretty primitive. Transferring human sins unto innocent animals? A guiltless man done to death as a substitute? Savage. Frightening. Repellent. Material only suitable for horror movies, surely?



I wish it were so – were human beings not what they actually are. Scapegoating appears so universal and endemic in ‘civilised’ societies that it must satisfy some need, not very nice, to be sure, but very necessary in fallen human nature. (The ‘fall guy’ notion is one of its modern transmutations.) Dr David Kelly, the nuclear scientist ‘sacrificed’ by the powers that be to distract public attention from the Government’s handling of the Iraqi war, looks like a classic scapegoat to me. Now it is the turn of Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon to bear upon himself the Prime Minister’s sins. I’d hazard the guess President Bush might well wish he had a rather voracious sin eater handy in the White House…



Fr Frank, forgive us, but you are getting a little too self-righteous. You snipe away at statesmen, who after all have a big job to do. What about your own sins? Don’t you ever feel you yourself may stand in need of a sin eater?



Touche’. My horrible sins are as scarlet as the blood of the Hebrew scapegoats of old, no doubt. But I am glad you brought that up. Because it leads me on to my Al-Hallaj project.



Eh? Al-Hallaj? Who he?



Al-Hallaj is a Sufi saint. Suffered atrocious death by crucifixion on a gibbet in Baghdad centuries back. Still much revered today amongst mystically-inclined Muslims. The ‘martyr of love’, they call him.



And what’s the project named after him?



The Cross, crucifixion is the key.



Doesn’t sound very nice, Fr Frank…



Aha! That’s the world’s secularist voice that speaks. But Christianity never was meant to be ‘nice’. Nor was the Cross, a dreadful instrument of torture, ever nice. Yet, it is the worldwide symbol of the religion of love.



Can we get back to Al-Hallaj, please? You still haven’t explained…



I can only hint at it. (Further hints in my modest website: www.fatherfranksrants.org.uk) But I’d better keep it simple. As Al-Hallaj suffered on a cross as a witness of love, so the project named after him centres on the need for Christians to become Christ-like, to suffer ‘pour aimer les Mussulmans’. Clear?



As mud, Fr Frank. And why French? You must be in mischievous mood today. We just hope you are not going in for sin-eating, are you?



No way. A priest already disposes of proper sacramental means to remit sins. And my Arkadash Network isn’t anything like a sinister, occult ‘order’ poised to take over the Vatican, as the film describes. Also, the 500-year-old eponymous movie character strikes me as thick as two short planks. ‘Knowledge is the enemy of faith…when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back at you’, are the sort of corny phrases the sin eater trots out. That is not my theology. Knowledge comes from God. (Al-‘Alim, ‘The Knower’, in Islam is one of the 99 divine names, by the way.) The word itself appears 221 times in the New Testament. (Feel like checking that out?) My own Anglican Church had such fame for knowledge, leaning, that her priests used to be called stupor mundi, the wonder of the world. As for the abyss, well, that’s more likely to be the name for the mess the Church is in today. But the solution isn’t to look away but to face it resolutely and fearlessly.



Gosh, is this ending on an apocalyptic note, Fr Frank?



Is that bad? The Bible ends that way. In the end, God. The New Jerusalem. So, things fall out pretty well after all.