Ultraman and the Eucatastrophe
To address this next interpretation of the theodicy, or the “Problem of Evil”, and how it relates to a Catholic reading of Tsuburaya’s work in science fiction, I first need to emphasize a specific point. All Christian theology starts with the understanding that God is both all-powerful and all-good (omnipotent and omnibenevolent). Thus, logically speaking, there can’t be any part of God which is lacking, incomplete or not good. God cannot desire evil or suffering because that would contradict his nature as all-good. God also cannot allow these things to exist unopposed simply because he is unable to stop them, because that would mean he is not omnipotent. The only thing that would restrain God is the simple logical impossibility of him contradicting his own nature.
“Holy Trinity”, fresco by Luca Rossetti da Orta
Of course there are philosophers and theologians who argue those points on some level, but this essay is concerned about a Catholic reading of Tsuburaya’s work. We’ll leave the gnostic heretics to their own devices and just look at the orthodox points.
So far, we’ve addressed two of them, showing how natural disasters and catastrophes embodied by kaiju can represent either the natural consequences for humanity’s sins, or the awe-inspiring glory of God’s creation which humbles those who encounter it.
Those points aside, this leaves orthodox theologians with only one other alternative that unifies all these principles: the reason why God allows evil things to happen is so that a greater good may come about from it. In the case of Christianity, that “greater” good is the salvation offered by Jesus Christ’s passion, death and resurrection.
This point is no mere afterthought, however. It forms the central mystery of Christian teaching and practice. During the height of Holy Week, the highest days of worship in the Church’s annual liturgical calendar, the event of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection is represented by the celebration of the Easter Vigil. On the night before Easter Sunday, Catholics celebrate a special long and dramatic Mass to represent this central mystery. At the beginning of this Mass, a specially long and dramatic preface called the Exsultet is also recited to the people. This reading explains the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and how it fits within the larger context of God’s actions throughout human history, from the very beginning of creation.
This idea of evil being allowed to exist so that good might prevail, and not just prevail but be made stronger, brighter, and more gloriously triumphant in that victory, is especially illustrated in a line of the Exsultet:
O truly necessary sin of Adam/
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault/
that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!
“The wages of sin is death”, according to the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans (6:23), and human beings’ mortality and mortal suffering was understood to be a consequence of unrighteousness, or obstinance against God’s will. The “fault” the Exsultet describes is the original obstinate refusal of God’s will, Adam and Eve’s fall in the Garden of Eden. And yet, in a seeming paradox, it is that same fall that brings about something even greater in the full perspective of God’s salvation.
Humanity lost the Garden of Eden, but gained “so great, so glorious a Redeemer”. The very mechanism by which humanity has been chastised – death, even death on a cross – becomes the way we are reunited to God’s will, the new path of righteousness.
Just as Jesus Christ fulfilled this expectation of a “greater” good that would bring salvation out from darkness and despair, the central heroic figure of Ultraman also gives a new dimension to a Catholic reading of Tsuburaya’s work.
After Ultra Q proved a success, Tsuburaya expanded further on the idea of exploring how humanity encounters the unknown with the Ultraman series. Even if the series don’t explicitly use the word “unbalance”, this concept still remains an important theme of the franchise, even after Tsuburaya’s death
I’ve often seen a claim stating the earliest concepts for Ultraman depicted him as a villain. As far as I can tell, that’s not true. From the beginning, Tsuburaya favored the idea of humanity interacting with a friendly alien, even before the show was called “Ultraman”. The early concepts for Ultraman’s suit design, however, are obviously more alien-looking than the final version.
Even with these more inhuman designs, Ultraman was always intended to be a positive character. This concept illustrates a figure who is strange, intimidating, maybe even terrifying in his scale beyond humanity, but is also undeniably benevolent to humanity. Like the concept of “unbalance”, this idea also has grown to become a fundamental part of the franchise, even in modern installments.
This reversal of expectations, the mechanism by which humanity faced destruction in previous kaiju stories now becoming our help and protector, is only one way that Ultraman plays out the startling drama of this kind of theodicy. In addition to this, the series opens and closes with death in specific ways that relate to this theme.
The first episode of the original Ultraman series begins with a pattern of events similar to Ultra Q. The Earth is faced with a seemingly-random disaster that arrives from the stars, two aliens crash on the planet and drag a conflict with them that could overwhelm humanity’s ability to defend itself from the terrifying fallout. This disaster is compounded by personal tragedy, when Shin Hayata, a pilot with the scientific research and defense organization, the SSSP, is killed in the crash by accident.
But there’s a twist this time, and the story develops in a way that marks Ultraman as a new development from both Ultra Q and other contemporary kaiju media. Rather than simply accepting Hayata’s death as a necessary casualty, Ultraman instead chooses to give his own life to the young human.
This not only brings Hayata back to life, but also gives him the power to use Ultraman’s own huge size and strength to fight against Bemular, and other monstrous threats the characters face throughout the show.
In this way, a great disaster that might have only brought suffering instead gives humanity a hero, a way to protect the planet and the lives on it from further disasters. The mechanism by which terror and destruction is brought to the Earth – in much the same way we see happen in other kaiju shows and movies – becomes humanity’s hope for overcoming it.
To take this theme even further, there’s another death the show grapples with – Ultraman himself in the finale. After fighting to his limits, Ultraman falls in the battle against Zetton. This might have been humanity’s darkest hour, after watching their hero and champion defeated by this alien invasion.
However, in another twist of paradoxical salvation, this becomes humanity’s greatest accomplishment because the SSSP defense team goes on to defeat Zetton with their own courage and technology.
In both examples, we see suffering and death, the “evil” that is wrestled with when considering the “Problem of Evil”, lead to even greater victories. The characters of these stories are made stronger as a result of their struggle through these trials. The eventual victory they achieve over that darkness is more joyous, and poignantly powerful because they faced such terrifying challenges.
This concept strongly echoes something that J.R.R. Tolkien referred to as “eucatastrophe”. The word comes from both the Greek “catastrophe” meaning a sudden turn of fate, and the prefix “eu-” meaning “good”. He described it as follows in one of his essays, “On Fairy-Stories”.
“The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn”… it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
Tolkien understood the purpose of these types of joyous twists of fate in stories as a sort of consolation for the readers, to give them hope against dark circumstances they might find in their own lives. Personally, I hear a lot of similarities to how Tsuburaya describes his own work, “stories of magic”. That magic comes from a child’s perspective, but it’s far from childish, instead it perseveres through trials, disappointments and struggles that every adult faces in their life.
Christ Carrying the Cross, with the Crucifixion; The Resurrection, with the Pilgrims of Emmaus, Gerard David
Going back to theology, the reality of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection is itself a eucatastrophe, and more importantly within Christian teaching, it is the eucatastrophe that makes all others possible. Tolkien himself even makes that point in both the essay “On Fairy-Stories” and in later letters. But this sudden turn of death into new life isn’t the only theological connection to be found in Ultraman. The last article in this series will analyze what I consider to be the most strongly Catholic element of the franchise, which relates to why the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ himself is so specifically central to Catholicism.
