Doubt



I feel like there's about 20 different threads here I could pick up on, but there's one in particular that seems often overlooked in most of the reviews I've read. Doubt, as the first scene of the movie makes clear, indicates our common humanity, as distinct from Divine certainty. And there we encounter an uncomfortable paradox that seems to define the movie: the farther we are from Grace, the closer we are to our fellow humans. Is it any wonder that the questionable ethics of the Priest go hand in hand with being the movie's most sympathetic character?

But the movie is about Meryl Streep's nun, more than anything else. And it's made clear that her certainty of the Priest's sin takes her "a step away from God"--and so it's a certainty that is in stark contrast to the religious certainty of the simple and naive Amy Adams character. What are we to make of this? Is Streep's nun sacrificing her own salvation for certainty? The movie doesn't tell us who's right and who's wrong, who's bad and who's good--not because it wants to be pretentious, but because the concern of the movie falls directly into that abyss, and if we had that information it would let us off the hermeneutic hook, as the audience.

Ultimately, I'm inclined to think the tragedy of this movie is not really an epistemological one, nor the dehumanizing and abstract theological codes that demand certainty of fallible human beings. The tragedy is that in the face of the dizzying metaphysical uncertainty that Streep's nun faces she can only respond by trusting her own intuition. Paradoxically, in the terms of the movie, distancing herself from her fellow human beings in both her certainty and her doubt. And thus she is denied even the comforting human community available to us in God's absence. The despair in that final scene is infinte.