The Father Brings About the Order: Blade Runner (1982) and Ferdinand Ulrich on the Theological Apriori of Atheism

Catholic historian Christopher Dawson coined the following phrase: “From the very dawn of primitive culture men have attempted, in however crude and symbolic a form, to understand the laws of life, and to adapt their social activity to their workings.”[1] At the beginning of any culture and its order thus stands a certain conception of life and its origin. Based on this principle of the connection between life and order, the present essay ventures into the notion of life prevalent in modernity and the kind of order generated thereby. At first glance an unlikely pairing, both Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner (1982) and German Catholic philosopher Ferdinand Ulrich will help unmask the concealed theological narrative that underlies the modern notion of life. Disclosing its “founding myth” makes atheistic life surprisingly intelligible.[2] Its order is established through the constant rejection of any traces of an absent Father-God. Yet this rejection takes the force of its indignation from the old Christian virtues of justice and love gone mad. 

Blade Runner (1982): Unmasking the Hidden Theological Narrative of Atheistic Disorder

St. John Paul II stated in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae that life in modernity is reified and emptied of all content and transcendental relation to God and placed under man’s control and manipulation.[3] Once life is hollowed-out in this way, the consequences for the social order are profound.[4] The pope exclaims: “The values of being are replaced by those of having. The only goal which counts is the pursuit of one’s own material well-being. The so-called ‘quality of life’ is interpreted primarily or exclusively as economic efficiency, inordinate consumerism, physical beauty and pleasure, to the neglect of the more profound dimensions—interpersonal, spiritual and religious—of existence.”[5] In essence, life is conceived as material, and as something shaped by what we impose upon it.[6] 

The atheistic backstory about this empty life is disclosed brilliantly in Ridley Scott’s movie Blade Runner (1982). In the movie, the Tyrell Corporation has created humanoids or androids, so-called replicants, who are nearly indistinguishable from humans, only stronger, without empathy, and almost as intelligent. These replicants are sent to colonize other planets. They labor in “off world” mines and fight in unspecified military campaigns. As non-humans, they do not possess rights, but are classified as slave-machines, a designation that clashes with their human appearance. Real humans are asked to constantly deny their own sense experience and reject any natural urge for empathy towards humanoids. To distinguish humans from replicants, and to protect humans against them, a legally sanctioned fail-safe mechanism is reputedly built into their existence: their lifespan lasts only four years. 

Predictably, this “social” order leads to violent mutiny, perpetrated by a band of replicants in an off-world colony. This catastrophic event leads to replicants being banned from returning to earth, with the plot of the film following a group of mutinous replicants under the leadership of a combat humanoid, Roy, and their attempts to rectify this unjust order. The Blade Runner Detective Deckard (starring Harrison Ford), a policeman-bounty hunter who employs a polygraph-like machine to distinguish replicants from real humans is tasked with hunting and “retiring” the mutinous replicants.

The climax of the movie occurs when Roy barges in on Tyrell, who is dressed in white and clothed in divine symbolism, sleeping in his residence atop a huge pyramid-shaped building. He wonders at the intruding replicant’s intention: “Would you like to be modified?” he asks. “I had in mind something a little more radical,” Roy responds. “What . . . seems to be the problem?” Tyrell asks. “Death,” the replicant answers. Tyrell, dryly: “Death . . . Well, I am afraid that is a little out of my jurisdiction.” Still believing in Tyrell’s omnipotence, Roy demandingly voices the profound line: “I want more life, Father!” and proceeds to suggest different technological methods to help extend his lifespan. The plot twist, however, is that without Roy’s knowledge, all these methods have already been tried. Tyrell confesses to his failure: “All of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you!” Roy replies: “But not to last.” Roy is deeply disillusioned: his limited lifespan turns out not to be something jealously withheld, or artificially limited by choice, but the result of his maker’s lack of power. Tyrell is simply too weak to be a true father, impotent as he is to carry through upon his desires to create a life that would bear the likeness of his own permanence.

With this climactic scene of Roy confronting his maker, the movie graphically depicts the loss of fatherhood in stark contrast to the redemptive return of the prodigal son. Even though Tyrell lauds Roy with the line: “You are the prodigal son—You are quite a prize!,” he is not a true father who can forgive and lastingly generate his son’s life. Rather, he revels in Roy’s brutal “squandering” of his inheritance by “burning twice as brightly.” This is not a father, but a bad artisan who only admires Roy as an extension of his own power. Such a “father” is worthless to Roy, and at the end of the scene, Roy brutally disposes of Tyrell by squeezing his eyes out. This seals the fact that Tyrell was profoundly blind to (and detached from) the depths of desire for life he had unleashed. 

The scene arguably carries strong theological overtones and bespeaks the modern situation. The horizontal plane of the interpersonal relationship between Tyrell and Roy, father and son, maker and artifact, discloses how things stand within the vertical axis of God’s relation to the world. Tyrell is a figure of the deist God, whose creation is a machine that he treats as his slave. Such a God withholds his free life from the world in a jealousy born from the threat posed by the very agency he creates. This bespeaks a profound loss of divine fatherhood insofar as it pits God and man against each other on a univocal ontological plane of master and slave.[7] A free life can only be wrested from God by human uprising, which not only means disposing of God as the original giver of life, but eradicating his image and traces, essentially his presence, by asserting his impotence to communicate his life in the first place. The narrative about God’s impotence secretly provides the justification for creating a god-free zone.

In stark contrast to the Christian view that Christ on the Cross freely and obediently gives his life away for the world to establish the Church and her order, in the atheistic view it is up to man to foist justice upon the impotent God by killing and forgetting him. This murder of God is the last step man must take to complete God’s failed attempt to create a just and free order. Built into the founding narrative of modern atheism is the damnatio memoriae of God. Ironically, revisiting the memory of God helps explain the roots of the disorder.

Ferdinand Ulrich on the Theological Apriori of Atheistic Disorder

The foregoing interpretation of Blade Runner can be substantiated and complemented by the ,thought of German philosopher Ferdinand Ulrich. Ulrich has reflected much more deeply on how the implicit narrative about God embedded in modern atheism amounts to a “theological apriori,” a certain preconception of God that is rejected. This rejection, however, secretly derives its force from asserting a radical goodness that is only imaginable because of God’s revelation in Christ: 

At the root of atheism is man’s attempt to free himself by grasping at being which has seemingly been withheld from him, to become a partaker of its infinity and complete its handing over. […] Man breaks open with violence the dimension of being as love which was thought to be previously closed in on itself. And because being is “likeness of divine goodness,” the God who keeps safe this kind of being in himself and does not hand it over, is either killed or […] he needs man to release himself from his own selfish torpor as absolute block of essence, to mediate himself concretely and, from this presupposition, then to be able to communicate being in reality.[8]

Ulrich draws a connection between atheism and Genesis 3. The snake tempts Eve to distrust God and violate his commandment not to eat of the tree in the middle of paradise: “This tree is excepted. … should God have kept something for himself with that tree? Did he perhaps not offer and give you everything in his ‘love’? […] Perhaps man is still expropriated and still alienated from his actual ability to be himself?”[9] God’s love is thus put in question in the name of what the snake presents as a more radical gift of love and goodness than the one God has already enacted in history. This gift of life, however, is not acknowledged and believed in as carrying God’s life-giving presence within it. 

In the eyes of the snake, God’s gift of life seems embroiled in the contradiction of a simultaneous yes and no: He gives, without giving completely, such that man must take the initiative and resolve this contradiction through his own self-emancipation to take life from God.[10] Atheism is a revolt against God in the name of human freedom and justice that presupposes and “confirms this ‘limitation’ of God” while simultaneously rejecting that very God in the name of a greater good.[11] With this hidden presupposition of God’s limitation, and the corresponding loss of divine transcendence, presence and fatherhood, comes the metaphysical emptying-out of life and its reduction to a kind of material and reified quality. Such a life needs to be fought over, imbued with meaning, and technologically improved according to human ingenuity. Thereby such life implies its own comprehensive social order. 

A rediscovery or recapitulation of the narrative underlying this atheistic conception of God and life presupposes faith. The famous Augustinian maxim coined by Anselm of Canterbury proves its value here: credo ut intelligam (“I believe, so that I may see”). Man cannot but believe in some kind of narrative about God, even if that narrative is atheistic. This is true even for the agnostic: He must believe that the truth about God escapes man. Only by acknowledging the inevitability of some kind of faith or belief in God does man start to regain a sight of his own first principles. 

To clarify who the God is that Christians believe in, Ulrich turns to the Trinitarian debates of the fourth century surrounding Arianism. The consubstantiality of the Son with the Father confirmed by the council of Nicaea directly pertains to the question of whether God is omnipotent enough to communicate his life and substance fully to another in love. The Christian faith in a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit affirms and believes precisely in a Father who generates an order of freedom and love from eternity. For Ulrich, then, trinitarian doctrine profoundly shapes the Christian conception of created life as freely and completely given over in love: 

The living God has always already communicated himself through his very being, which is why we pray in the Gloria: We give you thanks for your great glory and not primarily for this or that gift. This is the response to the atheism of the Deus Faber, who cannot communicate himself, but, as it were, in producing keeps the other at bay.[12] 

As Augustine would say, life for God is not an accidental quantity or quality in the realm of having, but belongs to the very being of God himself, who is what he has and has what he is.[13] For Ulrich, atheistic life has two faces that belong to the same coin. God can either be experienced as powerless to communicate his life fully or he can be seen to jealously withhold it.[14] The predictable response is either rebellion or self-negation, and each response brings its own progressive or reactionary social order. In other words, either we affirm our life by wresting it from its maker and releasing it from a God whose weakness and irrelevance we must constantly unmask to feed the rebellion against him, or we acquiesce and affirm the jealous God and defend his power to withhold his presence and the stifling order that follows from it. Instead of annihilating God, man annihilates himself for God’s glory. Ulrich claims that even this self-annihilation becomes man’s tool for grasping at God’s lordship and submitting it to man’s own logic of opposition between God and life. This life, however, is strikingly similar to the life wrested from God as it is ultimately just as emptied of all meaning. Both faces of this life and its order, man as either master or slave, are merely stages in a dialectical process that presupposes and produces the death of God.[15] 

Conclusion

Contemplating in faith the implications of the conception of God and life for the social and political order is crucial for the Church in her encounter with the world.[16] Faith in the Trinitarian God and a remembrance of God’s true fatherhood allow us to uncover the false preconceptions about God embedded in atheism. The loss of fatherhood stands at the beginning of a materialist conception of life that brings disorder and rebellion against God. To avoid falling into an atheistic paradigm of a life that is reified, it is pertinent to recapitulate the philosophical and theological roots of an atheistic conception of life and uncover in the world the memory and desire for a truer life. For Ulrich, the forgotten memory of a Christian and Trinitarian notion of love and life is paradoxically the hidden justification for the disorder generated by either rebellion or slavish subordination. 

By virtue of its truth and goodness, life cannot but bear the presence of the giver within by pointing beyond itself. If we can see in life the goodness of the giver and his love, the presence of the Thou or He within the Id, we can make a new beginning—a true beginning that takes its ordering principle from a God, who gave man being and freedom completely without holding back. The affirmation of life is only true if it becomes an affirmation of the transparency of life to God’s fatherly goodness, who gives generously to all his creatures out of pure love. The Incarnation brings out the truth about God’s love we are meant to live in an extreme fashion giving the lie to all false narratives: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16–17). To affirm life in this light is to contemplate Christ present in it, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

[1] Christopher Dawson, Enquiries into Religion and Culture (Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2009), 79. 

[2] Among others, David Bentley Hart has also unveiled the hidden presuppositions about God inherent in atheism that run counter to the transcendent Christian God. See his Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 

[3] See the famous lines in Evangelium Vitae [henceforth EV] 22 that describe the modern situation of man: “Life itself becomes a mere ‘thing,’ which man claims as his exclusive property, completely subject to his control and manipulation. […] Moreover, once all reference to God has been removed, it is not surprising that the meaning of everything else becomes profoundly distorted. Nature itself, from being ‘mater’ (mother), is now reduced to being ‘matter’, and is subjected to every kind of manipulation.”

[4] The famous passage from the U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, 1992 strikingly reveals this hollowed-out conception of life: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” 

[5]EV 23. 

[6] Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), calls the modern subject “self-defining” (6) and shows that this kinds of “full self-possession requires that we free ourselves from the projections of meanings unto things” (7). A cosmic rational order would prevent the subject from defining itself: “Manipulability of the world confirms the new self-defining identity, as it were: the proper relation of man to a meaningful order is to put himself into tune with it; by contrast nothing sets the seal more clearly on the rejection of this vision than successfully treating the world as object of control” (8).

[7] See Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), where he points to Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx and Comte as examples for this opposition of God and the world in modernity. 

[8] “Ulrich, “Apriori,” 33.

[9] Ulrich, “Apriori,” 34. 

[10] See ibid. 

[11] Ulrich, “Apriori,” 35. The modern rejection of such an unjust God is rooted in the revelation of a loving God which atheism cannot help but affirm without faith in him. See “Apriori,” 52 and 55: “Atheism has driven out of the world a caricature of God and thereby has said yes to the ever-greater God.”

[12] Ulrich, “Apriori,” 46. 

[13] Cf. Augustine, On the Trinity I.12.26: “that which [the Son of God] is, is at the same time that which He has.”

[14] See Ulrich, “Atheism and Incarnation,” 28–31. 

[15] See Ulrich, “Atheism and Incarnation,” 43–46.  

[16] John Paul II in EV 34–38 points to Irenaeus as the patristic point of orientation for what life means in the Catholic sense.