"City Square" tells the story of the people who lost their self-thinking and fell into blind worship after the Christian power gradually became more and more powerful in ancient Rome. Although the element of love is added in the film, this love is also closely bound up with religion and politics. On the one hand, it sets off Pasitia's pure passion for truth, and on the other hand, it uses the perspective of two men to lead the audience to experience Christianity. and the ancient Roman city-state politics, the mutual influence and unilateral control between the Christian bishops and the majority of believers. After watching this video I want to briefly discuss the issue of belief and thought.
·Ideological bondage and people who are unaware of the bondage
Judging from the belief process of the little slave Daus, these Christian believers in the film voluntarily accepted their beliefs. The existence of a belief must have its rationality. It is a very common thing for people to cast a reverent look at God when they cannot use the knowledge of natural science to solve the mysteries in life. The savior's care and relief for the people at the bottom has blinded this belief in God, transforming from the search for the unknown into a worship of a certain set of rhetoric like supporting the monarch. With a slight modification of their rhetoric by their leaders, the otherwise obedient people can instantly turn into thugs, and their active belief becomes an unconscious, passive bondage. I don't agree with Le Pen's absolutism in "The Crowd", but I have to admit that his argument on "how to build a mechanism similar to religious belief" is indeed valid.
The tyranny of thought and the bondage of thought transcend religion, and it can be observed in almost all periods of human society. The development of natural science and the many ideological emancipation movements have taught us the importance of reason, but now we really have reason and will no longer be bound people? There are so many things to reflect on about this. Take the case of Sun Yang taking medicine this year as an example. When the incident just came out and the truth had not yet been found out, most of the netizens seemed to be carried away by the word "patriotism", and domestic public opinion overwhelmingly supported Sun. Yang, scolding Western media and foreign players, anyone who questions Sun Yang's character at this time will be sprayed with blood, and even more, they will be detained as "celebrating foreigners" or "traitors" hat. Maybe I wouldn't be so nervous if this happened in an era of backward productivity, but it's too close to us, as if the progress of science is just making our blindness less violent, and we tend to be more emotional. That part never seemed to change. Therefore, we must restrain ourselves, read more and think more, and try to use reason to control our sensibility, so that blind things appear less frequently.
·The controlling relationship between religion and politics in ancient Europe
This is actually a very interesting topic. Just like the penetration of Christianity into the politics of the Roman city-state in the film (which eventually turned into control), religion and politics in parts of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages always seized power and influenced each other, and the belief in the Orthodox Church The Eastern Roman Empire is "the unity of politics and religion", the emperor is the pope. But no matter which model, the religions of Europe will always interfere in politics, and they are the mortal enemies of the rulers, and they are also the best tools of the rulers. The admiral in the film loves Xipatia, but the guidance of the Christian bishop and the pressure imposed by the people made him question Xipatia (perhaps there is a reason why there is no love), It became a pawn for Christianity to control Roman politics. This change of attitude is full of drama, and the scene of the Admiral kneeling in front of him at the bishop's exhortation, holding his leg and weeping in agony is mixed with a sense of sacredness and tragedy. On the one hand, the transformation of the admiral speaks of the helplessness of those who were swept away in the great tide of the environment, and on the other hand, it speaks of the compromise of religion by the political rule of ancient Rome.
· Rational ups and downs
In the first part, I mentioned that the faith of the Christian believers in the film has gone from answering the unknown to blind worship. Their worship is very vague. There is always a layer of paper between the believers and the real God, which needs the help of priests or bishops to pierce them. I think that the polytheistic religion of ancient Greece can coexist with natural science and it is inseparable from the specificity of its depiction of the gods. It is precisely because these gods are very specific and contradict each other. People's belief is a spiritual The detachment of the level is not the absolute worship of a certain character or a certain rhetoric. Only in this social environment will people who pursue the truth be born.
The film tells the story of the fall of a "goddess" who was born in this kind of environment and believed in the truth. It talks about love and mob, but the portrayal of reason makes people feel sad. Her father, who believed in the truth with the heroine, inevitably died. The slave who was interested in science rebelled. Her student eventually became a bishop because of her belief and became her enemy. The admiral who loved her eventually aimed the knife at her. . If it weren't for the second slave beside her as her assistant, the whole film seems to be the only one who enjoys reason alone and pursues the mystery of the operation of the celestial body alone. In the end she was "defeated" and blind faith overthrew eternal truth. But the film did not let this tragic ending go on forever. At the end, it slowly zoomed out the camera, from a person to a city, from a city to a continent, an entire earth, and then to infinity universe, just as it began. It seems to be a book, and this tragic story is only a subsection of it, the former story has passed, and the later story has not yet begun to be told. At the beginning it pulled us into a bustling ancient Rome, and at the end it took our minds away. The magnificent music seemed to give us time to reflect and remember.
In the long river of history, truth always exists, and new things are born out of old things. The light of reason has temporarily fallen on this page of human history, but sooner or later it will rise again like a new star.
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