Saturday, 16 September 2023

Part 1: What is Messianism? And what has it got to do with Sephiroth?

Sephiroth, Sefirot and the concept of the One

Let us begin, then, by delving into some of the real-world religious and mystical signification of the names and themes in FF7. However, this will require a bit of patience on your part before we get to talking about the game itself.

As I said at the beginning, this essay will argue that the target of FF7’s critique is the cultural phenomenon of messianism. Ordinarily in an essay of this type, one might begin by giving a dictionary definition of this concept, so that everyone knows exactly what is being talked about. Dictionary.com defines messianism as 1. ‘the belief in the coming of the Messiah, or a movement based on this belief.’ Or 2. ‘the belief in a leader, cause, or ideology as a saviour or deliverer.’[1] Similarly, Britanica.com describes messianism as ‘applied to a variety of “redeemers,”’ adding that ‘many movements with an eschatological or utopian-revolutionary message have been termed messianic.’ Further, ‘Although messianic movements have occurred throughout the world, they seem to be especially characteristic of the Jewish and Christian traditions.’[2] As this definition hints, the problem is that the word “Messianism” has different significations depending on the religious or cultural context where it is used. Even within certain religions, particularly Judaism, there are different manifestations of this concept that look quite different to one another, arising from different traditions of interpretation and religious practice. In this essay, then I will argue that the writers of FF7 drew upon religious sources to exemplify the phenomenon of messianism as it appears in various contexts, both religious and secular. That is to say, FF7’s is not focused on any one manifestation of messianism, even if it makes specifically Kabbalistic references. Of course, I do not believe that Kazushige Nojima and the others are seasoned religious scholars, and nor do I think the point of a video game is to thrust this kind of learning down the throats of average players. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the real-world sources of inspiration behind the game’s story, and to use that to make sense of what its real-world message might be. 

Let’s turn to the meaning behind the name “Sephiroth”. Sephiroth, as is widely known, draws his name from the kabbalistic term “Sefirot”. The meaning of this term is difficult to explain without first explaining some other basic concepts of Kabbalah. Firstly, in Kabbalah, God is understood as an infinite being, existing in a formless state, beyond the comprehension of mortal beings such as humans. In this context, God is referred to as Ein Sof (or “En Sof”), a term which means “without end”. [3] Ein Sof is said to have no characteristics which can be meaningfully or truthfully described, since the nature of these characteristics so far exceeds the boundaries of human knowledge as to make all attempts at description incomplete, and therefore false.[4] Kabbalah’s conception of God would then count as an example of what is often called “apophatic” or “negative theology” in religious thinking more generally. This refers to the idea that God can only be known in terms of what he/she is not (this idea in both Christian and Jewish thinking, may be traced back to the Neo-Platonist philosopher Pseudo-Dionysus).[5] If Ein Sof is transcendent or infinite, the Sefirot, by contrast, represent the worldly emanations of Ein Sof which can be understood by the human mind. These emanations of God are manifested in specific instances of wisdom, understanding, kindness, glory, or other humanly comprehensible “spiritual” attributes.[6]

These “emanations” are typically visually represented as 10 points or nodes on a diamond shaped pattern, often referred to as the tree of life. You have probably seen this image represented on countless new-age self-help books and death metal album covers. The term Sefirot, gathers together the multitude of God’s emanations, the ten nodes on the tree of life, into a united whole. This gathering together under one term is an important point to grasp. Sefirot is a notoriously difficult word to translate into English: early Kabbalists espoused many different meanings of the term including “text” “scribe” “storytelling”.[7] However, it is typically understood, in a more literal way, to mean something like “count” or “enumeration”.[8]  The 10 Sefirot are thus the finite, countable, and worldly manifestations of the infinite God; the word Sefirot is the gathering together of these worldly manifestations into a single representation.  

To fully grasp the significance of this, we must make the point that counting involves gathering together discreet entities into a single representation, such as a number or a symbol. For example, one can readily grasp that a picture of ten, individual, red apples is far less efficient at representing the real apples than the words “10 red apples”. The same is true of the Sefirot: it is much easier to condense the information about the different emanations of Ein Sof into a single word than it is to name all of them. This idea has a long pedigree in Western philosophy, but also in Christian and Jewish religious thinking, and can be traced back, in both cases, to the Aristotelian doctrine of “hylomorphism” (and probably earlier, to Plato’s dialogue the Timaeus).[9] Put simply, hylomorphism designates the notion that all beings are composed, not only of matter, but also of form. For the classical Greeks, the concept of form was invoked to explain what causes objects to maintain their identity despite physical changes to their component parts. Some of you reading may be familiar with the Ship of Theseus – the philosophical conundrum that asks whether a ship is the same ship (i.e. the same form) if it has all of its planks (its matter) replaced. Returning to our number-example, we can think of the symbol “10” as a singular form which gives shape to the many 1s which add up to the number 10. This form also contains qualities that are not to be found in the matter which it gathers together: this is often what is meant by saying that something is more than the sum of its parts. For example, even if 10 is made of 1’s, the number 10 has various qualities that are not shared with the number 1, such being divisible by 2 and 5. We might also think of the capacity of a boat to carry large, heavy objects on water, even if its individual planks could never do so. The hylomorphic doctrine assigns an active role to form: it is form which acts upon the matter to give it shape and unity. In relation to Kabbalah, we can understand the notion of Sefirot as hylomorphic: the term Sefirot gives a singular representation, i.e. a form, purpose and identity to the different spiritual powers that add up to the tree of life.

The hylomorphic theory is not just a philosophical idea, but also, historically, one which has come to have a spiritual dimension attached to it. Even if one is not aware of Aristotle, Plato or any of the medieval philosophers they inspired, most of those raised within a Western cultural context can intuitively grasp the importance of oneness or “The One” as a primordial harmony of things. Typically, this oneness is understood as a pure point of origin at the beginning of time, or the oneness of God’s creation before Adam and Eve’s fall from innocence in the Bible, or perhaps, in new-age thinking, the sought-after oneness that would return the world, and the self, to a state of perfect balance. But we can also recognise here the cultural idea, common in the West, of a person who is the One, whether that person be God, his human embodiment in the guise of a messiah, or in a secularised idea of a person whose mission it is to lead, save, or redeem, humanity. In this context, hylomorphism is expressed in the idea of one person representing or somehow gathering together the multitude of human beings and conferring upon that group a meaning, purpose and form (“hyle”) that they would not otherwise have.

For example, in Christianity (whose development was closely entwined with the spread of Platonism and Aristotelianism), Christ is not “Christ” in isolation. Rather, he is only who he is in so far as he represents a kind of spiritual containment (or, to be more politic, inclusion) of his followers. This is at least part of the significance of term Holy Spirit: for instance, in 1 John 4:12 it is written that ‘No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit.’[10] This idea of “the One” who gathers together the many, who gives them a shape and a historical meaning, and who acts on their behalf to bring about a cosmically pre-ordained destiny, is also common outside of the specifically Christian context. We have already seen how this hylomorphic philosophy informs Kabbalah, and we will see it again in connection with other secular forms of messianism. It is this idea which, intentionally or not, the developers of FF7 have invoked in naming the game’s main antagonist Sephiroth, i.e. “count”. In what follows, we will try and make the connection between this Kabbalist concept of Sefirot as counting or oneness, and Sephiroth’s character arc in FF7s story – specifically the way he gives a negative form and meaning to Cloud and the other protagonists.

Sephiroth’s messianism, and the logic of sacrifice

Here, we will begin to show how these hylomorphic concepts of messianism borrowed from Kabbalistic (but also Christian sources) are exemplified in the game through Sephiroth’s increasingly monomaniacal behaviour.

After reading the books in the Shinra mansion during the Kalm flashback, Sephiroth explains to Cloud:

This Planet originally belonged to the Cetra. Cetra was [sic] a itinerant race. They would migrate in, settle the Planet, then move on... At the end of their harsh, hard journey, they would find the Promised Land and supreme happiness […] Long ago, disaster struck this planet. Your ancestors escaped... They survived because they hid. The Planet was saved by sacrificing the Cetra.[11]

Further, Sephiroth explains his own connection to the Cetra as he (mistakenly) understands it at this point: The Jenova Project wanted to produce people with the powers of the Ancients...... no, the Cetra. ...I am the one that was produced.’ Shortly afterwards, in the Nibelheim reactor, Sephiroth explains ‘I am the chosen one. I have been chosen to be the leader of this Planet.’ At this stage in Final Fantasy 7s story, Sephiroth’s messiah complex is not fully fleshed out. Yet we can already see some important themes emerging in this dialogue and begin to recognise their connection to the concept of Sefirot we described above.

Firstly, we grasp Sephiroth’s sense of persecution – he identifies himself mistakenly as a ‘Cetra’ (their name for themselves) rather than an Ancient, as is clear when he corrects himself in the quote above. If Sephiroth is a Cetra, it seems to follow that he is, in some sense, a victim of the historical ‘sacrifice’ that he has described. The word ‘sacrifice’ is another interesting choice here in the context of Sephiroth’s self-identification with the persecuted Cetra race. This terminology and its context ought to remind us of the old meaning of the Biblical term ‘holocaust’ (derived from French, Latin and Greek). In its earliest usage, this term signified a religious, sacrificial offering, and only came to have the modern meaning of massacre much later in the 1670’s. [12] Sephiroth’s usage of the term ‘sacrifice’ here carries both of these meanings, given that within the story of FF7, the Cetra are more or less extinct. In other words, only through the mass, sacrificial killing, i.e. the holocaust of the Cetra was the planet ‘saved’, according to Sephiroth. Just as a religious sacrifice is typically something offered up in exchange for the gods’ good favour, so the Cetra were offered-up in exchange for the continued life of the planet.

Secondly, it becomes clear that this sense of persecution is linked in some way to Sephiroth’s notion of being a special individual. Not only is he ‘the chosen one’, but he has been chosen for this role by virtue of his membership of the persecuted Cetra race: as he puts it ‘I have orders to take this planet back from you stupid people for the Cetra.’ There is a paradox in this line of dialogue. On the one hand Sephiroth professes his superiority as an individual by claiming to be ‘the chosen one’, yet in the very next line, he places himself at the service of an external power, stating he has ‘been chosen’ (i.e. by someone else). One way to read this is that Sephiroth understands his legitimacy as being conferred upon him by an entity greater than himself, namely the collective will of the Cetra race: Sephiroth’s actions are supposedly done ‘for’ the Cetra at large, not just for himself or Jenova. Yet the opposite interpretation is also strongly suggested to the player, namely that this acknowledgement of a power greater than himself is a spurious appeal to an absent authority, the Cetra, who cannot speak for themselves on account of being (mostly) extinct.

Finally, we also see that the concept of a cosmic destiny or eschatology plays a significant role in Sephiroth’s thought process. By eschatology, I mean any discourse which expresses ideas about the end of the world or history in terms of a pre-ordained destiny. An eschatology can be religious, as in the Christian notion of the salvation of the elect at judgement day, but it can also be secular, as in communist, fascist or any other vision of an ideological utopia. In FF7, the persecution and extinction of the Cetra was not simply a neutral fact of history as far as Sephiroth is concerned. Rather, he understands the Ancients as playing a part in an eschatology, in which the reward for their harsh, earthly lives was to be given the ‘supreme happiness’ of a ‘promised land’. This, of course, reflects the real-world Jewish notion of a chosen people or the Christian notion of being elect. But it also reflects many different secular narratives that equate the grand destiny of a nation, or of an ideology with a particular ethnic, social, or religious identity. Returning to the game, Sephiroth does not see himself as actively taking the role of chosen one; rather, it is an obligation that has been placed upon him and which he passively accepts, as he has been ‘chosen’ and given ‘orders’. In short, Sephiroth’s messianism is a result of his understanding of history, of the tragic role his people played in it, and in the notion of a cosmically-ordained destiny (the attainment of the “promised land”) which it is his duty to bring about. Once again, the obvious comparison here is with the Jewish notion of Israel but could apply just as easily to the American concept of manifest destiny, or any other real-world ideology in which God or capital-H History designates a certain people as the chosen people, or any place as the promised land.

Later in the game Sephiroth explains how he intends to live-up to the role of chosen one. Here it becomes clear that it is not enough for Sephiroth to be the chosen one in the sense of being a special individual. Rather, he also intends to become the One; that is to say, a hylomorphic, spiritual container of everything that lives and exists. In the temple of the Ancients, he explains:

I am becoming one with the Planet […] All the spirit energy of this Planet. All its wisdom...knowledge... I will meld with it all. I will become one with it... it will become one with me.

According to FF7’s in-game lore, when any living being is born, it is imbued with spiritual energy, which is bestowed upon them by the planet’s “lifestream”. Likewise, when the same beings die, this spirit energy returns to the planet’s lifestream. The lifestream then serves as a concrete representation for the games central theme of “life”, as described by Hironobu Sakaguchi in contemporaneous interviews.[13] In this piece of dialogue, what Sephiroth says mirrors the earlier quote from 1 John, which bears repeating here: ‘God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we live in him and he in us’.[14] Just as God is ‘in’ the Christians and the Christians are ‘in’ God, so Sephiroth aims to become “one” with the lifestream, at the same time as making the lifestream “one” with him. Nor is this comparison a merely a superficial parallel between the syntax of 1 John 4:12 and FF7’s dialogue, as the intermingling of Sephiroth and the lifestream is supposed to enable Sephiroth to inhabit the role of God, just as the Christian God only ‘lives’, in some more or less metaphorical sense, through the intermingling of his ‘Spirit’ and that of his believers. In the temple of the Ancients, Aerith asks Sephiroth: ‘How do you intend to become one with the Planet?’ Sephiroth replies:

It's simple. Once the Planet is hurt, it gathers Spirit Energy to heal the injury. The amount of energy gathered depends on the size of the injury. What would happen if there was an injury that threatened the very life of the Planet? Think how much energy would be gathered. Ha ha ha. And at the center of that injury, will be me. All that boundless energy will be mine. By merging with all the energy of the Planet, I will become a new life form, a new existence. Melding with the Planet... I will cease to exist as I am now... Only to be reborn as a 'God' to rule over every soul.

In other words, by injuring the planet, and by absorbing the energy it gathers to repair itself, Sephiroth will have gathered all of life into himself. At this point in the game’s story, Sephiroth appears to have given up all pretence of serving the chosen people (i.e. the Cetra), or anyone other than himself, ‘I'm far superior to the Ancients. I became a traveler [sic] of the Lifestream and gained the knowledge and wisdom of the Ancients. I also gained the knowledge and wisdom of those after the extinction of the Ancients. And soon, I will create the future.’ Yet, his messianism remains, in the sense that he still regards himself as the One, or as the bringer of One-ness.  If Sephiroth’s destiny is to be the chosen one, he will achieve this by robbing life of its difference, variety, and diversity, and making all other selves identical with his own self, imposing his monolithic vision of the future upon them.  Once again, one may note the sacrificial logic of what Sephiroth says. In many religions, the process of spiritual growth is believed to be one that involves sacrifice, whether that be literal offerings to the gods (as in the medieval meaning of the term ‘holocaust’), the sacrifice of wealth or personal possessions (as in the case of “tithes” paid by Christians or Islamic “Zakat”), or even sacrifice of personal attributes, attachments or attitudes (as when Saint Paul ‘put away childish things’ in 1 Corinthians 13:11).[15] [16]In order to become the One, Sephiorth intends to sacrifice the lives of all living beings on the planet – a ‘holocaust’ in the more modern sense. To put it in the biblical terminology of Corinthians, life, in all its chaotic variety, is a mere ‘childish thing’ which Sephiroth intends to ‘put away’, in order to ‘become a new life form, a new existence.’

Sephiroth’s hylomorphic vision of a perfect world comes at a cost, then. The player, but also the game’s main protagonists are given a glimpse of this sacrificial logic in action a few scenes earlier, as Sephiroth kills the enemy operative, Tseng. Sephiroth consoles his victim and attempts to justify his actions ‘The way......lies here. Only death awaits you all. But do not fear. For it is through death that a new spirit energy is born. Soon, you will live again as a part of me. This scene does not merely show someone simply being killed, but is framed as a religious spectacle, as is clear from the fact that the death-scene is projected on a large, magical screen to the game’s protagonists, from the fact that the killing takes place in the inner sanctum of a temple, and even from the fact that Sephiroth feels the need to explain, or rather, impose an interpretation of his actions upon his audience in hieratic gestures and rhetoric. Moreover, we are shown that Tseng’s life is worth something to the people around him, and that his ‘sacrifice’ is a heavy price to pay. Immediately before Tseng is killed, we see him developing a romantic attachment with his colleague Elena:

Elena: Be careful, Tseng.

Tseng: Yeah... Hey Elena, how 'bout dinner after this job's over?

Elena: Th...Thank you very much. If I may be excused...

 

Aerith is also shown upset when the party find Tseng lying all-but dead near the opening of the temple, and explains her connection with him to the player’s party, ‘Tseng's with our enemy, the Turks, but I've known him since we were little... There's not a lot of people I can say that about. In fact, there are probably only a handful of people in the world who really know me.’ Within FF7’s story, it is not enough to show that Sephiroth’s perverse sacrifice involves ending the lives of many people. Rather, we, as players, must see that the sacrifices are worth something to the people involved, otherwise they are not really sacrifices. All of these contextual clues (i.e. the framing of the sacrifice as a spectacle, the religious setting, the dialogue) make it clear that Sephiroth is not simply murdering Tseng, but sacrificing him to the ‘new God’ that he himself intends to become. Within the story that FF7’s authors present, what is most disgraceful about Sephiroth’s behaviour – but also about messianism more generally in the real world – is not simply that people are killed in its name, but that terrible sacrifices are done on behalf of people who have not asked for them.[17]

But it goes even further. The writers of FF7 are subtle here to show Sephiroth doing what real-world ideologues and self-appointed moral guardians often do, namely, to sanctify their vengeful motivations with virtuous language. Thus, Sephiroth even forgets that his revenge is a revenge. As we saw in the temple of the ancients, Sephiroth presents his scheme almost as though he were doing the human race a favour, by allowing them to join with him as their “God”: ‘do not fear. For it is through death that a new spirit energy is born. Soon, you will live again as a part of me.’ Returning, once again to the comparison we made between 1 John and Sephiroth’s megalomaniacal declarations, we can see a subtle commentary on the way that many real-world ideologies and religions frame their beliefs and actions in terms of a universalised love, in which often oppressive actions are justified in terms of a greater benefit (doing a favour) to humanity. The concept of agape, as understood within Christianity is useful to grasp, here, insofar as it is central to many of the religious and non-religious messianisms that have emerged in the history of the West. The Greek term agape is typically translated as love, but the Greek term, as used in a Christian context is more specific, and refers to a sacrificial love between the individual, the human race and God.[18]  As 1 John 4:8 puts it, ‘he that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love’.[19] To be in God and to have God in oneself is to love one’s neighbour. Sephiroth’s attempt to engulf the entire human race within himself as their new god is simply a sci-fi fantasy representation of this idea of messianic agape. Sephiroth expresses his love for Tseng, Aerith, Cloud and the rest of the human race by sacrificing them.

FF7’s story here seems to rehearse Nietzsche’s condemnation of Christ in Beyond Good and Evil. This particular passage bears quoting at length:

It is possible that underneath the holy fable and disguise of Jesus’ life there lies concealed one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and desirous heart, never sated by any human love; demanding love, to be loved and nothing else, with hardness with insanity, with terrible eruptions against those who denied him love; the story of a poor fellow, unsated and insatiable in love, who had to invent hell in order to send to it those who did not want to love him -  and who finally, having gained knowledge about human love, had to invent a god who is all love, all ability to love – who has mercy on human love because it is so utterly wretched and unknowing. Anyone who feels that way, who knows this about love – seeks death.[20]

Sephiroth’s desire to murder the entire human race in order to have them in him (and vice versa) is a dramatization of this destructive, all-embracing demand for love. His explicitly stated desire to do Tseng and everyone a massive solid is the flip-side of an unacknowledged vengefulness, a vengefulness that is not even allowed to recognise itself as such.  Much as Christ, according to Nietzsche, ‘invents a god who is all love’ in order to satisfy his own ‘insane’ and ‘explosive’ demands, so Sephiroth’s personal wrath disappears behind the new god’s impersonal beneficence. The scene we witness during the Kalm flashback, as the town is vividly and memorably burnt to the ground, is the ice-cold ‘hell’ (Nibelheim) that is inflicted upon Cloud; the biblically-reminiscent falling star summoned towards the end of the game is Sephiroth’s last judgement upon the human race (see Revelation 6:12-14 - ‘lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood;).[21]

Sephiroth’s sacrifice of unwilling victims to attain the promised land, and to become the One, the new God, can thus be seen as a metaphor for the sacrificial, ascetic logic that is at play in real-world messianisms. His mercurial demeanour and his mock-biblical rhetoric dramatizes the tendency of messianic figures, religions and ideologies to hide cruel, violent and destructive intentions behind noble sounding words like love.

NOTES:

[4] Ibid.

[9] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/ “2. Prime Matter” accessed 16/09/2023

[11] All quotes from the script of FF7 I have taken from https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_script

[12] https://www.etymonline.com/word/holocaust (accessed 16/09/2023)

[13] “Interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of the Final Fantasy series and producer of Final Fantasy VII.” From PlayStation Underground #2, 1997. Accessed at http://www.ff7citadel.com/press/int_sakaguchi.shtml 16/09/2023.

[14] See note 10

[15] I prefer the KJV here of this verse, as it is the one most commonly heard. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+corinthians+13%3A11&version=KJV accessed 16/09/2023

 [17] See Georges Bataille Eroticism trans. Colin McCabe (Penguin Books 2012) “Christianity”. Bataille argues that Christianity attempts to remove the sacrificial element in religions by emphasising the ‘continuity’ between believers and the rest of existence, at the expense of recognising the ‘discontinuity’ involved in death: ‘The Christian God is a highly organised and individual entity springing from the most destructive of feelings, that of continuity. Continuity is reached when boundaries are crossed’. (119) This is echoed in Sephiroth’s desire to make everyone ‘one’ with himself. Further, Christianity hides the importance of sacrifice by making it impossible for the believer to be directly and self-consciously involved with it: ‘In Christian sacrifice the faithful are not made responsible for desiring the sacrifice. They only contribute to the crucifixion by their sins and failure.’ (120). This is echoed in Sephiroth’s indifference to the wishes of those he sacrifices.

[18] https://www.britannica.com/topic/agape (accessed 16/09/2023)

[19] Again, I prefer the KJV here for elegance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20John%204%3A8&version=KJV accessed 16/09/2023

[20] Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil in Basic Writings of Nietzsche trans & ed Walter Kaufmann (Modern Library 2000) section 269, p.410

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