“It could be worse”: On Tarkovsky’s final film, faith, and the mystery of sacrifice

In a journal entry from 1982, the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky described his struggle to believe:

The most important thing and the hardest is to have faith. Because if you do have faith, then everything comes true. Only it’s impossibly hard to believe sincerely. There is nothing more difficult to achieve than a passionate, sincere, quiet faith.

It is hard to be a Christian, and for so various reasons. The social pressures of a once-Christian society have all long since loosened. The collective memory of a once formidable moral bulwark has faded. The distractions of the digital age have proved more deranging than the previous excrescences of modernity. The sound of the Word blends into the din of one’s own self-talk, and carefully curated avatars become our own visions glorious as our true selves decompose in the attic and God is banished to Heaven. The holiest among us secretly wish they could face a dilemma like Maximilian Kolbe’s or Franz Jägerstätter’s—anything to force ultimate faithfulness amid the inescapable calls of secular sirens.

Tarkovsky belongs to a small collection of philosopher-theologians who have chosen the medium of film to explore the most important mysteries of reality through word and image. He is most famous for his 1966 masterpiece Andrei Rublev, a depiction of the medieval icon painter whose journey reflects the modern dilemma of how to create anything in a disenchanted world. And although Tarkovsky pronounced faith “impossible,” he did not quite mean it, as his films demonstrate. He wrote in another journal entry from 1981,

I went to St. Peter’s Square. I saw and heard the Pope’s appearance in front of the people—the crowd filled the entire square with flags, banners and placards. It’s odd that although I was surrounded by large numbers of curious people, such as foreigners and tourists, there was a unity about them which impressed me deeply. There was something natural, organic in it all. It was obvious that all these people had come here of their own free will.

On occasion, faith wins within us and among us. And when it does, it is revealed to solve a much more difficult problem than we might have imagined. As Pascal wrote,

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

How can man be so good and yet act so bad at the same time?

I was thinking of my own agonies and ecstasies of faith as I sat down recently to watch Tarkovksy’s last film, The Sacrifice, which is included along with Andre Rublev as one of the 45 films on the 1995 Vatican Film List. (Incidentally, I have co-authored a guidebook about the Vatican Film List, due out later this fall. I did not, however, write the chapter on The Sacrifice.)

All of Tarkovksy’s films reinforce Pascal’s point about Christianity and humanity many times over, and The Sacrifice is a particularly haunting terminus to his oeuvre. The main character, Alexander, is a former actor who has become a famous critic and teacher. He has a beautiful wife who cuckolds him, but he enjoys the pleasure of the young son she has born him in his dotage. Spiritually, Alexander is lost. Perhaps offering a contrast to the mysterious unity Tarkovsky witnessed in St. Peter’s Square, Alexander declares, “I studied philosophy, history of religion, aesthetics. And ended up putting myself in chains. Of my own free will.”

The opening credits to The Sacrifice roll to the sound of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion as the camera focuses on details from Leonardo DaVinci’s unfinished 1481 painting, The Adoration of the Magi. In the long opening scene of the film—a ten-minute single take—Alexander and his young son “Little Man” plant a Japanese tree as he tells the story of an Orthodox monk who planted and watered a tree every day for three years until it blossomed. Alexander then says to Little Man, who is mute from a recent throat operation, that there is value for the life of the world in an individual’s engagement in some daily, unchanging ritual. It is the order, more than the substance of the activity, that he speculates may bring some good.

Suddenly the part-time postman, a clownish Nietzschean named Otto, arrives on a bicycle, asking Alexander about his relationship with God. Alexander replies, “Non-existent, I’m afraid,” to which Otto quips, “It could be worse.”

The line, “it could be worse,” has troubled my thoughts greatly since I watched the film. The words make me uneasy because although Otto is a buffoon, his observation rings true. If my relationship with God did not exist, I would be walking the tightrope of nothingness trying to avoid falling into absolute meaning, and I might soon find it a precarious place. But instead, I already belong, I know the stakes, and I mostly choose to ignore them. I give God thanks in my sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving in the Mass, but then I turn right around and yell at the children for whom I swore to God I would live in absolute gratitude if He gave me them. I tell Jesus I trust him and require his mercy as I pray the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, and the next minute I trust only my own impressions as I mercilessly dismiss as idiots everyone else in “traffic,” as if I myself am not slowing down someone else. My gift, like Leonardo’s painting, is disturbing, because something beautiful has been begun, only to sit unfinished. It would almost be better not to have been (re-)born.

But God is gracious, and he permits disasters—including the ultimate disaster, death—to help us realize the paradox of our greatness and wretchedness before the end. And in the routine of sin, confession, absolution, grounded in our proximity to the fullness of life with Christ in the Eucharist, the small foretaste of reality may grow to become a more substantial feast: Our daily bread. More than a few Christians have therefore faced a sudden demise instinctively uttering the Our Father. Woefully unfinished creations reach perfection in an instant.

The Sacrifice proposes a late-Cold War worst case scenario: Alexander, his wife Adelaide and stepdaughter Marta, Little Man, domestic servants, and friends are torn away from Alexander’s birthday party on a jolly Swedish summer day when airplanes suddenly zip over their heads and warheads begin to detonate. It’s the end of the world, an occasion to examine a range of reactions to impending doom. Adelaide becomes hysterical and has to be sedated by Victor, her lover and a doctor, who remains stoic. Otto philosophizes, and Alexander finds a pistol and retreats, saying the Lord’s Prayer followed by spontaneous prayers of the heart, “Lord, deliver us in this terrible time.” He asks God to protect believers, unbelievers, and those who have never thought about God, “only because they haven’t been truly miserable.”

Alexander then vows to the God he has long ignored that he will sacrifice the love of his family and his beautiful home if only God will spare the world its present destruction. Suddenly Otto appears, telling Alexander to go find the housemaid Maria, a witch, and make love to her. Amazingly, Alexander does just what Otto says, and wakes up the next morning with the world back the way it was. He proceeds to put Japanese flute music on his hi-fi, don a kimono with a yin-yang design on the back, and trick his family into going for a walk so that he can burn down the house. In fact, Tarkovksy had to build and burn down two houses to get the shot—one of the most shocking scenes in all of cinematic history—because the film jammed in the camera on the first take.

As the building burns and the family members look on in horror, Alexander runs around raving until an inexplicably present ambulance drives him away, with the sound of the roaring flames giving way to the return of St. Matthew’s Passion. Little Man speaks for the first and only time in the film as he lies beneath the freshly-planted tree he has just watered: “In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?”

The meaning of Alexander’s sacrifice is mysterious by design. If it is a straightforward conversion story of a man whose sacrifice is acceptable to God for the sake of others, how does Alexander’s adultery with a “witch” fit in? If it is a statement about the persistence (and efficacy) of paganism, a theme Tarkovsky explores in other films, including Andre Rublev, then why the exclamation point of John 1 at the very end? As in many of the greatest specimens of cinema, of which The Sacrifice is clearly one, Truth is presented as a more valuable commodity by its elusiveness. Revelation is proposed better by the complexity of the image than by the clarity of the syllogism.

To me, The Sacrifice pulls the mind of the believer back to the difficulty of faith for the sake of a steely resolve to pursue it just the same. We make our sacrifices wisely and foolishly, at times in acts of truly selfless charity and at other times as tokens of self-soothing. We might ask on the one hand, if God wanted us to burn down our houses for him, why would he bother to send his Son to sacrifice himself for us? But on the other hand, why haven’t I plucked out my eye or cut off my limb if I really desire the Kingdom of Heaven?

Christianity is hard; but the Word comes back again and again, comforting us in our distress, giving us confidence to stay the course on the narrow path, restoring us to favor when we reject our inheritance, and giving us real peace—if only in fleeting moments—of the “passionate, sincere, quiet faith” that Tarkovsky longed for.

Why is that, Papa? Only He knows.