The director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s 2005 film Kingdom of Heaven restores nearly an hour of cut footage, and transforms a confusing, action-centric theatrical narrative into a more philosophically ambitious meditation on faith, morality, and personal responsibility. Despite its ostensible setting in the High Middle Ages, however, the film’s ideology is unmistakably postmodern. Its leaders and institutions are fundamentally corrupt and morally bankrupt, except for the leper King Baldwin. Organized religion is portrayed as a cynical tool for mass control and justification of violence. The film gestures at the possibility of a Kantian universal morality: its knightly oath is to “speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death.” Both Baldwin and Saladin are held as paragons of their respective faiths, capable of peaceful coexistence, mutual respect and understanding. But the film largely takes the universality of its values for granted, and lands on acting according to one’s conscience, a fundamentally subjective judgment, as its maxim. Perhaps most perversely, Balian’s refusal to kill Guy de Lusignan and marry Sibylla is presented as moral sophistication though it leads to the loss of Jerusalem and the displacement of its inhabitants. His crimes of murder and adultery are waved away without consequence when he returns with Sibylla to his village in France, perhaps due to the Pope’s same promise of atonement for crusaders that the film earlier treated with skepticism. Ultimately, the extended film’s broader philosophical scope reveals an unresolved moral confusion rather than any coherent guiding principle.
Organized religion and institutions in general are cynically portrayed in Kingdom of Heaven. At the beginning of the film, Balian’s wife has died. His brother is the village priest, who embezzles money meant to pay for her funeral, steals a gold cross from her body, and orders her corpse beheaded out of spite. He abuses his position of religious authority; rather than providing guidance and consolation, he tells Balian that his wife is in hell, hoping to drive Balian from the village so that he can take his property. This provocation leads Balian to kill his brother and then join Godfrey on his voyage to the holy land in search of redemption. The village’s lord behaves in a very similar manner towards his own brother Godfrey. He and his son (Godfrey’s nephew) wish to inherit Godfrey’s lands and titles in Jerusalem; they ambush the crusaders under the pretext of bringing Balian to justice for his brother’s murder. Other authority figures are similarly unprincipled and are often inept. Guy’s hubris leads the army of Jerusalem to destruction. With Saladin’s army approaching, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, the head of the Catholic Church in the Crusader states, recommends surrender, and for the survivors to convert to Islam and repent later. Baldwin and Saladin are rare exceptions to this pattern, both accomplished commanders and consummate politicians who seek peaceful coexistence, yet they too must manage the demands of the extremists and zealots in their own camps.
The film seems to endorse a kind of spiritual agnosticism anachronistic to its medieval setting, rather than any organized religious belief. There are a few supernatural elements to the film; the Hospitaller is implied to be an angel: he appears and disappears at opportune moments, speaks on moral and religious matters with total conviction, and can revive Balian with a touch after he is knocked unconscious by Guy’s assassins. After Balian sets a dry bush ablaze by throwing pieces of flint, a second bush starts burning absent any human intervention. Yet these supernatural or divinely influenced elements remain deliberately ambiguous or explicitly reject institutional religious views. Balian and the Hospitaller discuss that while the Pope may command the crusaders to kill infidels in the name of God, it is not what “Christ [would command them to do], nor this king.” On his deathbed, Godfrey is asked to repent his sins, to which he states that he repents “all but one.” In effect, Godfrey is consciously risking his immortal soul to say that he is proud of his son – and we as viewers are invited to be skeptical as to whether this act merits the possibility of eternal condemnation. Balian explicitly voices his skepticism of dogma when he tells the Patriarch, as they are cremating the bodies of the fallen to prevent disease, that “God will understand. And if he does, he is not God.”
Conversely, upon being knighted by Godfrey shortly before his death, Balian takes his knightly oaths seriously. He is charged to: “Be without fear in the face of your enemies. / Be brave and upright, that God may love thee. / Speak the truth always, even if it leads to your death. / Safeguard the helpless and do no wrong.” For the most part, he upholds these values: most notably, he protects the civilians of Kerak at the risk of his own life and that of his men at arms; later, he personally organizes the defense of Jerusalem. Yet knighthood in Kingdom of Heaven is somewhat subverted as merely a social construct, albeit a useful fiction with the power to influence people’s behavior. Balian personally knights many of the levied defenders of Jerusalem to raise their morale, over the protests of the Patriarch. The film’s intent is to portray these knightly oaths as an intermediate stage on a journey of moral development. This broadly mirrors Kohlberg’s theory, in which moral reasoning progresses from a conventional, rules-based understanding to a post-conventional set of universal ethical principles. Having ostensibly achieved this higher level of moral understanding, Balian later willingly gives up his lands and titles to Almaric, his second in command, before returning to France.
After Balian’s arrival in Jerusalem, he speaks with King Baldwin, who tells Balian that he is personally accountable for his actions, and that when answering to God, “it will not suffice to say that I was told by others to do thus.” The king’s policies are of tolerance and peaceful coexistence, in contradiction of the official position of the Catholic Church. Political expedience, social convention, and institutional command should not dictate right action. What remains is one’s free will and private relationship with God. Yet when Balian goes to the Temple Mount in his crisis of faith, hoping for private religious revelation, he finds none. This is the Nietzschean predicament: right and wrong were once derived from divine fiat, but one must somehow proceed without its guidance. What distinguishes the film’s agnosticism from Protestantism is that its beliefs are no longer premised on faith at all. The Hospitaller tells him that he “puts no stock in religion,” and that “holiness lies in right action.” But this advocacy for works wholly detached from faith, which the film frames as angelic revelation from the mouth of a vowed warrior-monk, is heresy from the perspective of every major Christian denomination. Moreover, it hand waves and assumes its way past the greater difficulty of how to decide what is to be done when higher guidance has fallen silent or been discarded.
The film desires to arrive at a universal set of guiding ethical principles, but this is a fundamentally difficult problem that is left unresolved. “It is a kingdom of conscience or nothing,” becomes Balian’s maxim. Baldwin is ultimately dying of leprosy. He asks Balian to assassinate Guy, marry Sibylla, and assume leadership of the kingdom of Jerusalem so that peace can be maintained in the holy land. Balian refuses, because his conscience will not allow him, and this choice is portrayed as post-conventional moral sophistication, made of his own free will. The absolute framing of his maxim borrows the aesthetic of universality and a reasoned categorical imperative. But individual conscience is not universal; it is essentially a moral intuition or feeling that many people may reasonably object to. Moreover, conscience as a decision-making mechanism is flawed. Moral intuitions are accompanied by moral reasoning, not only for the purposes of persuasion and coordination through rhetoric, but also for the close examination of decisions, yet the film exempts Balian’s choices from any such examination. Balian’s refusal to act leads to Guy ruling over Jerusalem and taking command of the army. Hostilities predictably resume between the Crusader states and the Muslims, and Guy leads the army of Jerusalem to military disaster and complete destruction by Saladin’s host. Though Balian personally leads the defense of the city, at this point the loss of Jerusalem has become inevitable. This has disastrous consequences for the people of Jerusalem who are spared from enslavement or slaughter by Saladin’s offered terms of surrender but are still displaced from their homes and livelihoods. Sibylla also abdicates the rule of Acre, Ashkelon, and Tripoli to go with Balian, abandoning the people of those states to their fates. Balian personally doesn’t face such consequences; he is permitted to leave unharmed and returns to France a hero.
Nor is Balian consistent in his principled refusals. While his brother’s behavior towards him is cruel, Balian kills the man in anger. He evades justice after killing his brother by joining Godfrey’s band of crusaders. He commits adultery with Sibylla when personally convenient but refuses to marry her for political gain and save the kingdom. He rejects belief in organized religion yet receives the Pope’s clemency offered to crusaders for his crimes in France. The Templars are also acting upon their moral convictions, yet the film condemns and portrays them as one-dimensional villains primarily interested in wealth, power, and personal gain while privileging Balian’s subjective judgment as the result of a developed morality. It is convenient that the film’s narrative happens to align with the established beliefs of much of its contemporary audience; this is moral self-congratulation that takes its smuggled premises for granted while borrowing the veneer of moral development and reasoned universality.
Perhaps in a secular modern age, one’s conscience is in fact the final arbiter of one’s actions. But the Nietzschean consequence is that to proceed without divine guidance is to compel every individual to construct and continually defend for themselves a new system of values. Kingdom of Heaven on the other hand presents subjective conscience as self-confirming and the absolute conclusion of moral development. It takes the universality and correctness of its viewpoint as axiom and invites its audience to nod uncritically in agreement. In the process, it justifies the reprehensible as sophistication, portrays caricatures of its opposition, and ultimately buries rather than resolves the fundamental question.
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Notes -
The first season of Homelander suggests otherwise. Maybe the ending must be modernly positive for mainstream appeal, but mainstream likes a charming antihero and recovery from despair.
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