doubt, part one

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0918927/
Doubt
directed by John Patrick Shanley
2008

The movie centers around the possibility that Father Flynn has molested an altar boy. He vigorously denies it; Sister Aloysius is certain of it, based on the slightest insubstantial evidence (in the end, just the briefest of moments when Flynn grabs another boy's arm). In the end, she engineers his resignation - though he is moved to another parish, as pastor.

The first moment in the movie that really struck me is when Flynn is angrily lecturing her about the proper way to approach these sorts of problems (the movie makes clear the institutionalized power differential between the nuns and the priests); he tells her that she is a nun, that she has taken vows, and that one of them is obedience. In response, she tears the cross from her robes and shouts that she will do what is right, whether or not that means walking out on the Church (and, it is suggested at the end of the movie, God). What I found interesting about this was the way it changed the way I saw her (almost literally). In every scene, Sister Aloysius is shown wearing a habit, and she seems to almost be that habit. One way of putting this is that there seems to be no gap between her will and the role of a nun: she is a nun.

But in that moment, I was reminded (she reminded us) that she is a person who chose to be a nun, that she took vows, and that she is not her vows. Suddenly she seemed like a person, one who might take off that habit and put something else on. It was a startling moment - to realize that she reserved for herself, in a very deliberate way, the right to judge what is right and worth doing.

(Schlegel responded to Kant by arguing that it is not our capacity to give ourselves laws that is most essentially human, but rather our capacity to break the laws that we have given ourselves).*

* Raymond Geuss, "Morality and Identity," p192. In The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O'Neill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.