Christopher S. Morrissey
Christopher S. Morrissey teaches Greek and Latin on the Faculty of Philosophy at the Seminary of Christ the King located at the Benedictine monastery of Westminster Abbey in Mission, British Columbia. He also lectures in logic and philosophy at Trinity Western University. He studied Ancient Greek and Latin at the University of British Columbia and has taught classical mythology, history, and ancient languages at Simon Fraser University, where he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on René Girard. He is managing editor of The American Journal of Semiotics. His book of Hesiod’s poetry, Theogony / Works and Days, is published by Talonbooks.
Bio last updated April 30th, 2018.
Articles by Christopher S. Morrissey
Outbreak of the Divine
By Christopher S. Morrissey
March 1, 2012
Discovering deep meaning in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.
But more significantly the movie also frames this meditative recollection with cinematic explorations of the Beginning (of the universe and the subsequent evolution of life on earth) and of the Beyond (the transcendent divine presence that interacts with a soul as it becomes immortal and journeys to the other side of death) Traditional dualisms like "nature and grace," argues Vögelin, are untenable in an era of globalization unless we can recapture in meditative reflection their experiential basis: "The dichotomies of Faith and Reason, Religion and Philosophy, Theology and Metaphysics can no longer be used as ultimate terms of reference when we have to deal with experiences of divine reality with their rich diversification In this regard, The Tree of Life is innovative because it shows the divine outbreak of grace within natural experiences: for example, one dinosaur gratuitously spares another or, more pertinently, the father (who seemingly symbolizes nature more than grace) and the mother (the opposite) both embrace Jack in a union more intimate than the filmic voice-over first suggests (with its invocation of the nature-grace dualism), because it is from the "one flesh" of their union that the family itself is generated—the natural union that hurtles every soul, from the Beginning, on its path to the Beyond Not only Vögelin but also the great German Thomist, Josef Pieper, author of Death and Immortality and The Platonic Myths, would have no trouble recognizing the significance of Malick's imaginative vision here: namely, that artistic "remythologization" is a Praeparatio Evangelica ("preparation for the new evangelization") when it returns with care and sensitivity to the truly real human experiences.