Film still, Conclave (Focus Features, 2024), directed by Edward Berger, written by Peter Straughan, and based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Robert Harris.
“Authority wants to replace the world with itself.“1
*
In “Turtles All the Way Up,” an essay published in The New York Review of Books, Jessica Riskin, a professor of history at Stanford, offers readers an intellectual history of free will and determinism. For Riskin, free will is a philosophical question and determinism is a Christian theology. Believing in determinism “doesn’t necessarily make you a scientific rationalist,” Riskin contends, “in some contexts, it might mean you’re a Calvinist.”
In her essay, determinism is figured by stackable turtles “all the way down.” These are the turtles of the ideology of infinite regress. As we will see, the living, breathing turtles Darwin observed on the Galápagos Islands represent Riskin’s preferred scientific rationalism.
But if free will is for philosophy and determinism (or the rejection of miracles or surprise) is for theology, might the miraculous be for science?
The turtles that interest me live in the Vatican, specifically in the 2024 film Conclave (if you have not seen the film, I will tell you when to stop reading further). In and through these turtles, I define the miraculous—or what surprises—as an observable material reality. Miracles are biological truths.2
But first, we turn to Riskin’s essay. She introduces us to the stackable, ideological turtles of Protestantism and the living, breathing turtles Darwin observed on the Galápagos Islands.
**
Riskin’s intellectual history of free will and determinism takes the form of a critical review of Robert Sapolsky’s book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023). Sapolsky believes that animals, including humans, do not possess free will and that evolutionary mechanisms determine every aspect of animal behavior. Summarizing Sapolsky’s view, Riskin writes, “Not only are we ‘not captains of our ships . . . our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.”
Sapolsky grounds his determinism in a fantastical tale about the world resting on a stack of turtles “all the way down.” It is “ridiculous and nonsensical to believe that somewhere down there,” Sapolksky writes, “there’s a turtle floating in the air.” In other words, the world is the product of “deterministic causes” rather than miraculous ones.
The irony is, as Riskin points out, “the original miracle deniers were Protestants” (Atheists, clutch your pearls!). Sapolsky’s supposed scientific determinism “remains what it has been from the beginning,” Riskin argues, “a [Christian] theology.”
To illustrate her point, Riskin asks us to take a quiz:
Which of the following passages were written by [Sapolsky] and which by [Calvin]?
- “The power of free will is not to be considered in any of those desires which proceed more from instinct than mental deliberation.”
- “From this it is erroneously inferred. . . .that there is some power of free will.”
- “You are privileged . . . with myths of freely willed choices.”
- “Whatever happens in the universe was destined to happen.”3
***
Before Sapolsky and Pierre-Simon Laplace, the nineteenth-century French “originator of modern scientific determinism,” wrote anything—an older, well-established tradition of Christian theological determinism existed. Along with Calvin, William Paley is a representative of this older tradition.
From Paley, we get the idea that organisms are akin to watches. And if we find a watch on the ground, we naturally infer that it has a maker and belongs to someone.
Riskin wonders what we might think about the watch if it “yelped and scuttled away, as many living things do when you stumble over them?” But Paley “relied on a peculiar notion of living things as passive, inert”—like a watch. What surprises Riskin is that “modern biology largely absorbed Paley’s model of organisms.”
Paley, an Anglican priest, was an incredibly influential intellectual for Charles Darwin. However, Riskin observes that Darwin “became less religious over the course of his life.” He took “a great interest in the capacity of animals to be their own creators, transforming themselves, one another, and their environment, and so influencing the course of evolution.”
Darwin’s followers did not follow suit. The idea that a “divine” force operates behind material reality became scientific dogma. Riskin points out that it was biologist Ernst Mayr who, in 1988, argued that “birds and other animals are no more purposeful than computers.”
Sapolsky’s argument is similar to Mayr’s. Animals are akin to AI.
****
Riskin concludes her essay by introducing us to a second group of turtles. She reminds us that Darwin described tortoises living on the Galápagos Islands (Riskin notes that all tortoises are turtles, but not all turtles are tortoises). Darwin observed these turtles creating and following paths leading up to the freshwater holes from the island’s lower region.
Darwin’s turtles incarnate Riskin’s scientific rationalism. Turtles and other “living beings [behave] with purpose, agency, and meaning; indeed, reclaiming those capacities from a divine creator. It’s turtles all the way up.”
Riskin’s intellectual history of free will and determinism brings us back up to earth and to observable, living turtles. With these turtles in mind, I risk a riff on Riskin’s intellectual history of free will and determinism. The turtles that interest me live in the Vatican, specifically in the Vatican of the 2024 film Conclave.
Spoiler Alert: I can’t explain the turtles in Conclave without revealing essential details of the film, including its surprise ending.
Film still, Conclave (Focus Features, 2024)
*****
Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), Dean of the College of Cardinals and overseer of the Conclave, the election of a new pope, notices Cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz) crouching near the edge of a fountain within the Apostolic Palace. Turtles are swimming in the waters and moving all around him. The following dialogue ensues:
Lawrence: The Holy Father’s turtles. He was very fond of them. A gift from Angola.
Benitez: I thought I was imagining them. I love them. They’re so clever.
Lawrence: Well, here they keep escaping and being run over.
Earlier in the film, we learn that Cardinal Lawrence desires to escape the Vatican due to a crisis of faith. He confides in his friend, a fellow cardinal and progressive candidate for the papacy, Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), sharing that he had discussed his lack of faith in God with the Holy Father and offered to resign as Dean of the College of Cardinals.
The Pope rejected Lawrence’s resignation. Instead, he offered enigmatic encouragement, telling Lawrence that “some were chosen to be shepherds, and some to manage the farm.” Without evidence, Cardinal Lawrence interprets the Pope’s message to mean that he is called to be a manager rather than a shepherd.
Lawrence’s interpretation of the Pope’s message is immediately called into question by Cardinal Bellini. He shares that the Holy Father confided in him that he, too, had lost faith—but not in God. The Pope had lost faith in the Church.
So, if leaving the Vatican will crush him, as Lawrence unconsciously suggests that it will (what escapes the Vatican gets run over), and if managing the College of Cardinals is not what he wants to do with his life, then what is possible for him, a supposedly faithless man, to do in and with the Vatican? It is an open question.
In a sermon given to the College of Cardinals before the Conclave begins, we learn that open-mindedness—being open to surprise—is something Lawrence values. He preaches that certainty is the enemy of unity:
In the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that there is one sin I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end.
Like the turtles living within the walls of the Vatican, faith is a living object:
Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.
Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. Let Him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness. And carries on.4
While Lawrence’s sermon startles most of his fellow cardinals, the Pope’s turtles astonish Benitez. As their conversation implies, Benitez doubts the existence of the turtles swimming and moving before his eyes. “I thought I was imagining them.” It is not until Cardinal Lawrence confirms their existence that Benitez accepts that the turtles he sees are real animals living within the walls of the Vatican.
The turtles swimming and moving around Benitez are not of the stackable variety; they do not exist in a fantastical ideological tale in his mind. Like the faith Lawrence spoke of in his sermon to the Sacred College, the turtles before Benitez’s eyes live and breathe.
The turtles, gifts from Angola, an African nation, may symbolize the theological foundations of the Catholic Church. Augustine was from Algeria, and Tertullian hailed from Tunisia.
They may also recall the late Pope’s love of creatures that evade ecclesial obsequiousness. As Lawrence notes, the Catholic turtles have a habit of escaping from the Vatican (only to be crushed by human carelessness and indifference).
Even those turtles that do not travel beyond the confines of the Papal Palace nonetheless travel well beyond their “proper place.” We last see a turtle in the Pauline Chapel, walking across the marble floor right after the cardinals have chosen the new Pope.
******
When Cardinal Benitez arrives at the Vatican, everyone is astonished by his presence. We discover that the Holy Father covertly appointed Benitez as a cardinal. Secrecy was necessary because Benitez’s assignment, leading the Christian community in Afghanistan, a predominantly conservative Muslim country, was a dangerous one.
The danger inherent in his assignment is amplified in the film by acts of terrorism in Rome. As the cardinals are voting for the next pope, a bomb explodes near the Sistine Chapel with such force it shatters several of the chapel’s windows—debris and shards of glass rain down on the cardinals.
Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a traditionalist and Italian contender for the papacy, exploits the chaos and fear resulting from the explosion to argue against open-mindedness (which he defines as relativism) within the Church:
Here! Here we see the result of the doctrine of relativism so beloved of our liberal brothers! A relativism that sees all faiths and passing fancies accorded equal weight, so that now, when we look around us, we see the homeland of the Holy Roman Catholic Church dotted with the mosques and minarets of Muhammad! . . .
We tolerate Islam in our land, but they revile us in theirs!. . . And now they are literally at our walls and we do nothing! How long will we persist in this weakness…? What we need now is a leader who will accept that we are once more facing a religious war!
Speaking in Spanish, Cardinal Benitez calmly addresses Tedesco’s anger and fear. He asks, “My brother Cardinal, with respect, what do you know about war?” He continues,
I carried out my ministry in the Congo, in Baghdad and Kabul. I have seen the lines of the dead and wounded, Christian and Muslim. When you say “we have to fight”—what is it you think we’re fighting?
You think it’s those deluded men who have carried out these terrible acts today. No my brother. The thing you’re fighting is here…inside each and every one of us, if you give into hate now, if we speak of “sides” instead of speaking for every man and woman. . . .
We have seemed concerned only with ourselves, with Rome, with these elections, with power. But these things are not the Church. The Church is not a tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next.
What happens next is that the College of Cardinals overwhelmingly elects Benitez as the next Pontiff. Lawrence also uncovers another secret about Benitez: his body is intersex, possessing a penis, ovaries, and a uterus.
Benitez tells Lawrence that when he realized he had female reproductive organs, he submitted his resignation to the Holy Father, but it was turned down. Here is their conversation:
Lawrence: He knew?
Benitez: Yes. He knew.
Lawrence: And he thought it was acceptable for you to continue as an ordained minister?
Benitez: I would assume so. After all, he made me a cardinal in pectore in full knowledge of who I am.
We considered surgery to have what you might regard as the “female” parts of my body removed. But the night before I was due to fly I realized I was mistaken.
I was who I had always been. It seemed to me more of a sin to correct His handiwork than to leave my body as it was.
Lawrence: Then you. . . you are still. . . .?
Benitez: I am what God made me. And perhaps it is my difference that will make me useful. I think again of your sermon. I know what it is to exist between the world’s certainties.
Lawrence is in the Pauline Chapel, contemplating what it means to exist between the world’s certainties, when he spots a small turtle walking across the marble floor. He approaches it and gently picks it up. As he places it back in the pond, he hears the roar of voices celebrating the white smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel.
In this way, the film explicitly connects Benitez to the turtles he discovered living within the Vatican Palace. It is well known that there are intersex turtles all over the world.
As gifts from Angola, the turtles may recall the theological origins of the Catholic Church, but they are not pious symbols of obedience to ecclesial tradition. The turtles embody surprise, change, and transformation.
*******
In “Turtles All the Way Up,” Riskin does not specify what she means by the miraculous. However, it is reasonable to assume that denying the possibility of a miracle means rejecting the potential for surprise. But Catholic turtles make it clear: surprise is a biological truth.
As the film suggests, neither Benitez’s nor Lawrence’s future is determined. Lawrence does leave the Vatican, but it is unclear what his departure signifies. What if he realized that the Holy Father was right about him: far from being a Church manager, he is more like a shepherd of turtles?
Moreover, Benitez trusts Lawrence. He voted for Lawrence to be the next Pope. And Lawrence responds to Benitez’s trust in him with faithful curiosity. And it’s a good thing, too, as the film implies that if Benitez were to return to his post in Afghanistan, his identity as a Catholic cardinal now exposed, he would be crushed.
But we do not know if Benitez’s intuition is correct. Will his difference prove useful to the Church?
What happens next?
To echo Benitez’s response to Tedesco, the Church is what happens next. And what happens next, the turtles remind us, is not preordained. If we are to be surprised by it, we must be able to accept the bodies before our eyes.
NOTES:
- Adam Phillips, Unforbidden Pleasures (2015), 97. ↩︎
- See my quick analysis of Trump’s wayward understanding of biological truth here. ↩︎
- Answers: Calvin wrote 1-2, and Sapolsky wrote 3-4. ↩︎
- Italics are original here and below. ↩︎
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