The last few decades have seen a dramatic turn away from Christianity in the West. And yet Christlike figures (those who lay down their lives for others that they would not die; St John’s Gospel 10:11) continue to show up as heroes in the stories of her popular arts. There are three such productions in particular that we will look at below: the video games Chrono Trigger (1995) and Sea of Stars (2023) and the television show Travelers (2016-18).
Protagonists
Chrono Trigger
This is a flighty sci-fi/fantasy role-playing game (RPG) involving time travel and the consequences thereof. Crono, the main character of the game, like the God-man Jesus Christ, undergoes a self-sacrificing death and later returns to life:
Crono possesses the archetype of the hero. He is brave, daring and selfless. . . . When Crono confronts Lavos in the Ocean Palace of the Kingdom of Zeal as a result of the rescue mission, Crono sacrifices himself to save everyone present. With the help of time travel, his friends manage to replace him at the moment before he dies with a clone received from the Millennial Fair in 1000 AD. thus saving his life. While the other six playable characters have many lines of dialog, Crono’s responses to events are usually implied only through reaction and gesture, often for a humorous effect, which wrongfully depicts him as insincere at the moment of his resurrection, as Crono and the others confront Lavos, destroy it, and return peace to Guardia.
Sea of Stars
Also an RPG. Garl is the Christ-figure in this game. He is not the main character, but he sacrifices himself to save the two main heroes from a powerful stroke meant for them by the main antagonist, an alchemist named Aephorul. Garl is imminently likeable; everyone is drawn to the selfless kindness that he exudes. His lowliness (he is the cook amongst the company of heroes) is also reminiscent of Christ’s humility.
Travelers
Like Chrono Trigger, this show also involves time travelling. Teams from the future travel back in time to stop a meteor from colliding with the earth and devasting life upon her. David is the image of Christ in this fictional universe. He strongly resembles Garl – imminently likeable. There is nothing to repel anyone from him; his meekness and humility and joy are infectious. He is a social worker who hits the streets every day to care for the poor and forgotten, giving even his own possessions to those he encounters. His sacrificial death comes when he ends up at the wrong place at the wrong time in his desire to offer back-up to a Traveler in need. Locked up alone with a nuclear bomb, he is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation as he disarms it, and dies soon afterwards after suffering through his painful final hours. His resurrection is affected by the jump at the end of the series to another timeline, where he exists, whole and hale.
Antagonists
Like Christ in the real world, these fictional representations are opposed by satanic/Antichrist figures, usually of a technological nature, further underscoring the desire for the authentic, good Christ. Technology, notably, is often linked in various writings old and new with the occult. Connor Tomlinson, a writer for The European Conservative, gives a few recent examples:
I am not the first to call this technological instinct demonic. Marx’s father mused on whether the “demon” which governed his son’s obsession with abolishing material inequality was “heavenly, or Faustian.” Schmitt observed that the “big industrialist has no other ideal than that of Lenin—an ‘electrified earth.’ They disagree essentially only on the correct method of electrification.” Schmitt believed the faux-neutrality of this expansion of technological progress would blind mankind to emergent existential threats—akin to the Antichrist. Marshall McLuhan called “the Prince of this World a very great electric engineer.”
UFOs and AI also are increasingly linked to the demonic.
In Chrono Trigger, Lavos is the ultimate satanic figure, an extraterrestrial ‘destroyer’ who is slowly devouring the life of the world, and who may be confronted only after trekking through a high-tech city (the Ocean Palace/Black Omen). There is also another evil, found in Robo’s story, an out-of-control AI program (Mother Brain) that has taken control of all the robots in the world and is using them to kill as many humans as they possibly can.
In Sea of Stars, we have mentioned the evil alchemist Aephorul. Alchemy, magic, and technology are often intertwined (or interchangeable). This is seen throughout the game – in Clockwork Castle, the domain of one of Aephorul’s dark creations, where lots of occult/technological work is done, in Sky Base, where an AI-powered device, The Catalyst, takes the souls of people out of their bodies and joins them to robots.
In Travelers, the device that allows humans to jump back in time is an AI quantum computer (dubbed The Director), which, as the series unfolds, is revealed more and more to be a merciless tyrant, a revelation culminating in its refusal to save David from a hideous death, despite him giving his life to save thousands of others’, and in the collapse of that timeline into utter chaos and destruction. The blasphemous phrase spoken about AI in the real world by certain technophiles – ‘We are creating God’ – is also repeated at one point in the series as The Director is being assembled.
Still Seeking Christ
In spite of all the darkness and confusion in the Western world (or perhaps precisely because of them), people are still drawn to Christ the Savior. If it seems contradictory that the Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations are dying at the same time, it is not: It is simply that people can no longer see the True Christ in them. And how could they, when Roman Catholics huddle close with Freemasons and Marxists/communists; when Protestants allow carnal dance raves in their venerable old churches (amongst other problems)?
It remains for the Orthodox Church to reveal Him to those who are truly seeking Him, through the lives and miracles of her saints, through her icons, through the Divine Liturgy and Holy Mysteries, through her prayers. And also from our offering to our neighbors what Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky called co-suffering love:
A word of instruction is good, and still better is an edifying example, but what is incomparably higher than these? What would we call that third force which we delayed to define for a time? This power is co-suffering love, this power is the suffering for the sake of another person, which sets in motion his regeneration.4 This mystery is not so far from us: it is often fulfilled before our very eyes, and sometimes even through us ourselves (although we do not always comprehend it yet). As a power of regeneration, it is constantly spoken of not only in the lives of the saints and biographies of righteous shepherds, but also in stories of secular literature, sometimes with extraordinary depth and accuracy. Both speak clearly of the active, revolutionary and sometimes insuperable power of co-suffering love, although the first do not explain its relationship to Christ as our Redeemer, and the latter do not even understand it. As an old proverb says, “words instruct, and examples persuade,” but co-suffering love pours out a new life-giving power into a sinner’s heart if he does not purposely push it away. In submitting one’s will to the co-suffering love of one’s mother, one’s friend, a virtuous wife or a good spiritual shepherd, or of the Chief Shepherd Himself (1Pt.5:4, as did Zacchaeus), the sinner suddenly finds in his soul, not the former hopeless debility and the indestructibly deep-rooted vices against which he has perhaps struggled so frequently, but in vain, but an influx of new strength, a new, enthusiastic vitality or a holy indignation. That which had formerly seemed attractive to him becomes vile, and what had seemed burdensome and tedious now becomes beautiful and sweet. The former curmudgeon and robber exclaims: “Behold Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I will restore him fourfold” (Lk. 19:9).
He gives accounts of this love from real people and from fiction:
About thirty years ago on Mt Athos, the great elder Jerome gathered about 2000 monks in the previously desolate St Panteleimon Monastery. He was distinguished by boundless meekness and compassion toward human weakness, yet all those who sinned or were heading toward sin felt that the elder’s spirit was in some manner blocking their path and, at the very thought of him, they were brought to repentance and went to him for confession. But this was not always the case. Once, the elder was peacefully sitting near the monastery gates when suddenly an enraged monk ran up to him, seized his beard and began beating him. “What is wrong with you?” the elder inquired peacefully. “You do not let me live!” exclaimed the monk, who was wrestling with some secret temptations. “But I do not even remember your face,” the elder said. The monk, however, was already at the blessed man’s feet, in tears of repentance.
The great Russian writer Dostoevsky masterfully portrays for us this action of co-suffering love which divides people into those being regenerated and those being condemned. Unbelieving visitors of Elder Zosima were so moved by his meek appearance and words that some of them were filled with repentance whereas others were so filled with malice that for no evident reason they would violate all rules of decorum.
Isn’t this kind of love exactly what our times, full of sadness and hopelessness, are crying out for? The existence of characters in popular culture like those detailed above would seem to confirm that it is. Metropolitan Anthony believes it is a key to the regeneration of man:
And so we confirm the truth divinely revealed to us and confirmed by observation and the experience of life, that the principle and strength of moral regeneration is the power of co-suffering love. To a certain degree, it is found even in the nature of unregenerate persons, as in maternal love. But a deep and decisive regeneration of a beloved one can be produced only by one who lives by Christ and depends on His power to bring about this regeneration.
Such a disposition of co-suffering love is a grace-bearing fruit of a godly life and of nature (the love of a Christian mother, for example). It is accessible to lay people who live in God, but usually only in relationship to certain close relatives, to a pious, trusted teacher or to comrades in activity or fate (Nekrasov takes an example from life in penal servitude); but in relationship to all people, the earnest of this gift is imparted in the mystery of ordination, something which our scholastic theologians have overlooked.
If Orthodox Christians do not give real love, co-suffering love, to their families, neighbors, etc., then the Orthodox Church will become just as small and irrelevant as the Protestant and Roman Catholic denominations have become, and the ideal of Christlikeness will remain unattainable, trapped within the confines of films, books, video games, etc. Worse, by chasing away God’s Grace, we will make our neighbors and ourselves susceptible to the deceit of the Antichrist and his techno-magic ‘miracles’. To avoid this tragic fate, we must make St. Symeon the New Theologian’s description of a good and worthy Orthodox priest’s character our own:
… who so loves God, that on merely hearing the name of Christ, he is consumed with love and sheds tears, and who, moreover, weeps over his neighbour, reckoning as his own the sins of others, sincerely regarding himself as the chief of sinners, and who, knowing the frailty of human nature, puts his trust in the grace of God and the fortitude which comes from it, and who, inspired by its fervour, undertakes this task [the work of priesthood] because of his zeal — disregarding human considerations — and is ready to lay down his very soul for the commandment of God and love of his neighbour (Twelve Homilies, ed.1869)…5
–Walt Garlington is an Orthodox Christian living in Dixieland. His writings have appeared on several web sites, and he maintains a site of his own, Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
