On the myclasses portal where this learning episode was found there were links for a movie. The following text with links was offered to the students, excluding images from the Twelve Monkeys movie, due to copyright concerns. Citations for the texts are available in the Readings and Further Links and Resource List.
Students attending a face-to-face class for this study watched the DVD versions of Twelve Monkeys using the class computer and overhead projector, while students studying as flexible learning were offered a copy of the film on CD-ROM, copied under the special provisions of local Copyright laws.
The second podcast for the fate and predestination theme area was also offered, covering later short stories and other texts after learning episode six.
| Some religious aspects of predestination |
| Prophecy, fate and destiny |
| Notes on Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys |
| Podcast II of the fate and predestination theme area |
| Readings and links |
The points at the start of these notes are to be discussed in the Forum area. You are asked to jump to the Forum area, using the link here and making a comment in the appropriate Forum thread. Please remember, your participation in discussions is expected in this study, as part of your overall participation.
Forum topics for discussion: |
From readings about religious beliefs relating to Predestination, how do time travel narratives you have read or viewed relate to this idea? |
| Is a belief in an omniscient God related to notions of changing individual destiny in time travel narratives? | |
| In Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995), the great tragedy of the planet-wide disaster is not avoided. What does the film tell the viewer about the use of time travel and about fate or destiny? |
In earlier learning episodes the fate and predestination theme area looks at the notion of Fate, such as in the film Timescape (Twohy, 1999), in which a man uses a time travel process to not only stop the death of his daughter, but also to return to an earlier period to save his wife, who died before the narrative begins. The battle against Fate seen in learning episode six occurs at an intensely personal level and also at a community level, to save an entire township from catastrophe.
Learning episode eight looks at where some of these ideas about fate and predestination come from. For this we glance in a brief and hasty fashion at some ideas in religious thought and at this stage immediate apologies are offered to any student from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. The materials presented here in all their brevity do not look to other religious beliefs but instead look to Predestination in Western culture. Any student who would like to add to these points, argue with them, or include other religious perspectives is invited to do so in the Forum section, above. The Forum is looking in particular for the convergence of philosophical and religious ideas of Predestination with the stories and movies covered in this theme area.
The Old and New Testaments have many instances of prophecy. The links for this pagea> will give many specific instances. In the New Testament it is said that Jesus Christ lived and died according to prophecies found in the Old Testament. Prophets such as Isaiah in the Old Testament book of the same name made predictions or prophesies that were said to have been proven by Jesus Christ and his actions.
An example of prophecy is seen clearly where Jesus speaks to God through prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and says that he does not want to drink the cup that he is offered, that is he does not want to be taken, crucified and put to death. Nevertheless, he says 'Thy will be done' and accepts his destiny.
There are hundreds of other examples from the New Testament where Jesus or another speaker promises events that will occur in the future. They claim a knowledge of the future, including a knowledge of salvation from death by faith in Jesus.
It is this idea of a knowledge of a destiny in and beyond this life that we are interested in here for our study in the Fate and Predestination theme area.
Religious leaders and theologians (those who study the Word of God) see in the New and Old Testaments many instances of prophets describing the future, even the future salvation of a particular person after their death. As a result of this many Christian religious leaders argued that God knows the future and therefore knows the individual future destiny of each human being. Because God can see the future, the individual salvation or damnation of each human is also discerned.
Following logically from this an early and very influential Christian Church leader, Saint Augustine, said that there was a divine decree that said that one portion of the human race was bound for everlasting life and the other portion to everlasting misery in damnation (Mozley, 1883:126). Those who do not perish are called the elect, and they will have everlasting life (Augustine in Mozley, 1883:127). Saint Augustine also thought that there was a certain and defined number of these elects that God knew would be saved, even before the world was made. In other words, these elect were Predestined by God to be saved, even before they were born. The number of the elect is certain and not one person can be taken away from or added to that number (Mozley, 1883:137).
However, this idea that a person is saved before they are born, that they are one of a definite number of the elect to have everlasting life seems to run counter to other ideas of the Bible (Maury, 1960:25). If God has predetermined the destiny of each individual, how can humans have free will? Free will seems to have been given to humans right from the start, from the Garden of Eden, where humans first chose to do evil, to exercise their own will independently from God.
This leads to worrying questions. If people are free in time, how is the God who orders time and all peoples' lives also the Lord of time? (Maury, 1960:25) What is the significance of human destiny if God existed before time and ordered our destiny from before we existed?
God, says Christian religion, is the Creator, and everything that is not God exists as creature (Maury, 1960:30). God did not wish to be the only one to exist. There is no indication anywhere that God needed the existence of the world or of humans. God is not subject to any constraint (Maury, 1960:31). It seems then that God can preordain human lives and whatever we do, here and now, does not change that final result at all.
Much later than Saint Augustine, another great religious thinker also considered the doctrine of predestination. This was John Calvin and he based his views on the interpretation of Saint Paul given by Augustine (Muller, 1986:22).
During Calvin's time there were many who questioned the idea of the predestination of the elect to eternal salvation. Calvin took great care to defend predestination noting that God rejected those from salvation because they chose to disbelieve in Jesus (Calvin, 1960:58). Calvin criticised those who thought predestination unjust, saying,
"What madness therefore for man to raise his hackles against this judge Himself by measuring His power by natural sense!" (Calvin, 1960:60)
Calvin stated that God used his own inscrutable judgment to decide who was to be saved and who was not and that human could not understand how these decisions were made (Calvin, 1960:64). This could even extend to those who lived their lives for good and then turned to bad. If God has preordained their salvation, they are saved. For, "He ordained the life of men and angels so that in it He might first show what freewill could do, and then what the gift of His grace and the judgment of His justice could do" (Calvin, 1960:67).
More modern religious views do not put such stress on the idea of predestination and many Christians believe that the individual does have the ultimate free choice to accept faith and be saved, or to turn from faith. As Maury notes, "it is our right to damn ourselves that we sometimes claim in opposition to the right God arrogates to himself in saving us in spite of what we are." Maury, 1960:39).
These arguments about predestination were vitally important in religious thought for many hundreds of years. As Christian religious traditions have helped form modern society, it is expected that this argument about human free will and the ability to change individual destiny might be seen in literature, music and art. There are many instances of the use of free will as a major theme to be found in both music and art, so this theme can also be expected in writing.
It is the argument of learning episode eight that the ancient interest in the role of individual human free will is seen clearly in the time travel narrative in the SF genre.
Consider the texts we have discussed and watched. So many of them look to the device of the time machine to change individual destiny, or even a collective destiny, or in the case of Timescape, to reverse destiny and bring back from death a loved wife, just as Jesus is said to have brought the dead back to life and himself conquered death with resurrection.
This learning episode argues that many SF time travel narratives revive the theme of fate and predestination that has concerned Christian societies for hundreds of years.
If there is a God, just how much individual freedom do we have? Is God also bound by Fate? Can anyone actually change their destiny?
Apart from the early 'time loop' stories by Heinlein, seen in earlier learning episodes, many of the narratives studied for the fate and predestination theme area seem to focus on the individual battling, and changing, destiny for the better! Is SF here playing a role in religious discussion?
These issues are looked at in the Forum discussion for this learning episode, found by clicking this link.
Short stories and films covered in earlier learning episodes look at time travel narratives where a lone hero travels backwards, or forwards, or both, in time and seems to change destiny in some specific way that is seen in the text.
In Twelve Monkeys (Gilliam, 1995) this is not the case, so the film is well worth viewing. For a start, there are several travellers in time and the time travel device is not broken or destroyed or put away forever at the end of the narrative. In fact, the time travel device is not even very important. Instead, a narrative about one human life dislocated in time is explored, as well as several, separate narratives about a coming plague that decimates the world and causes humans to live underground, like the Morlocks in HG Well's The Time Machine.
A great deal has been written about the Twelve Monkeys as a time travel narrative of worth, as can be seen in the detailed critique by Young online, and these points will not be covered here in case a good story is ruined by giving away the ending.
It is noted here that in the Twelve Monkeys text the time travel device is not seen to actually improve life or destiny for the world, for any one community and perhaps it does not do more than improve life for one man, for a brief time. Unlike so many other time travel stories, there is no real expectation that a world disaster can be stopped.
This text is to be discussed further after viewing and the critique by Young is considered, in the Forum area, above.
For this learning episode the second podcast for the fate and predestination theme area is also available. The podcast discusses some of the short stories found in learning episode two, and then in learning episode seven, as well as giving an overview of the discussion in this theme area for the second part of the course.
To listen to the Podcast II, please click on this link. Hopefully, it will assist you with the final in-class essay at the end of the learning episodes in this theme area.
Calvin, J. (1960). "Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God." Translated and introduced by Reid, J. London: James Clarke & Co.
Gilliam, T. (Director). (1995). Twelve Monkeys. Written by Chris Marker and David & Janet Peoples. Universal Pictures.
Maury, P. (1960). Predestination and other papers. London:SCM Press.
Mozley, J. (1883). A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination. London: John Murray.
Muller, R. (1986). 'In the Thought of Calvin', Chapter 2. Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins. Michigan, Il: Baker Book House.
Young, M. (n.d.). '12 Monkeys'. From website Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies. Retrieved 6 August, 2006 from http://www.mjyoung.net/time/monkeys.html
Further readings and links: |
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'Time's Arrow' by Arthur C Clarke |
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'A Sound of Thunder', by Ray Bradbury |
| Complete text of 'All you zombies' by Robert Heinlein | |
| Complete text of 'By his bootstraps', by Robert Heinlein | |
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| Podcast two of the fate and predestination theme area, downloadable here as an mp3 file of around 5Megabytes, called mysf_005_2008_02_11.mp3 |
ends
| enemy within | brave new world | fate and predestination | the shape of things to come | ghost in the shell |
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License. |
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