By David Armstrong

Caveat Lector: Massive spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 ahead.

James Gunn, who grew up Catholic, has offered two kinds of statements on religion in interviews. In one set of statements, he sees the value of faith, prayer, and meditation; in another, he has professed himself “anti-religion,” at least when religion is weaponized as a tool of exclusion. But religion is not God, and one need only watch the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy, particularly the most recent Vol. 3, to know that Gunn is a first-class theologian who is, if I could be so bold, God-obsessed. God, gods, beings with godlike powers, and beings with godlike aspirations are all over these movies, and the dialectic between divinity and humanity, between egotism at the heart of perfectionism and the altruism at the heart of receptivity, fill his work.

I could demonstrate this equally well with Gunn’s work so far for DC and what has already been released concerning his forthcoming DC Universe, whose first phase is entitled “Gods and Monsters” and begins with the film Superman: Legacy. But Guardians adds a certain heart to Gunn’s theological quest that, I think, gets to the core of his real question, which is one of theodicy. On the one hand, the world in which Guardians takes place is the vast Marvel multiversal reality, in which plenty of demiurgic beings, world souls, Titans, elder creator deities, godlings, superheroes, and cosmic tyrants are running all over the place, blasting, fighting, shooting, and snapping their fingers at the cost of the little people. Science fiction and space fantasy exist as genera partly to give artistic voice to our correct perception that the universe is an intensely dangerous place, filled with all kinds of things we don’t understand and that don’t care about whether we survive or are happy; we encounter such things on our planet all the time, and we are not in a position to say what “gods and monsters” might await us in the menacing black of heaven. At the outset of the first Guardians film, each character is hardened by this sense of cosmic indifference: Peter’s petty theft and philandering, Rocket and Groot’s mercenary gun-for-hire lifestyle, Gamorra’s career as an assassin, and Drax’s quest for revenge are all expressive of the callousness that a real face-to-face staredown of the horrors of the universe can affect. And yet, on the other hand, we also experience that we have profound need for love, companionship, family, and meaning, that there is real beauty, goodness, and truth to look for in the universe, and that it does seem like life, in all shapes and sizes, and consciousness, in all its forms, is important, that it is irreducible to draconian calculations of austerity (Thanos), classist assumptions of hierarchy (Ego), or materialist, capitalist, and utopian designs to continually “improve” things deemed lesser (the High Evolutionary). It is that second energy that causes us to look up at the cosmic spookiness and see instead “the forever and beautiful sky.” So what gives? Where does this surplus of meaning come from, and what do we do with it? If it comes from somewhere transcendent, good, and divine–“God,” in the ultimate sense, whoever or whatever God is–then we can pitch the same question: what’s with all the suffering?

Guardians: Vol. 3 posits these questions with a certain raw pathos as it explores Rocket’s backstory. Dying in the aftermath of a botched kidnapping by Adam Warlock, the audience sees in a series of flashbacks that Gunn’s version of Rocket began life as a baby racoon stolen from Earth and was cybernetically modified by the High Evolutionary to be a super-calculative genius. A member of Batch 89, including other sentient, mutilated, and enhanced animals like Lylla (an otter with robotic arms), Teefs (a wheelchair-bound walrus), and Floor (an adorable rabbit strapped into a nightmarish robotic spider suit), Rocket quickly demonstrates that he is the first and only creature the High Evolutionary has ever created with the independent power of “invention.” Rocket’s spontaneous intuition and creativity enable the High Evolutionary to create his new colony of Counter-Earth, only for Counter-Earth to become very much like regular Earth with regular Earth’s problems (including but not limited to an octopus man selling meth to cockroach children) but with humanoid animals instead of humans. But Rocket and his friends are not destined for Counter-Earth; upon learning so, Rocket attempts to help them escape, only for the High Evolutionary and his underlings to kill them all, except Rocket, who gets free and begins his adventures. The High Evolutionary wants Rocket’s brain extracted from his body in order to unlock the secret of his creativity and exploit it in his next attempt at utopia; the Guardians, meanwhile, want to steal the coding requisite from the High Evolutionary to save Rocket’s life.

Until about the third act of the movie, it is clear that the High Evolutionary and Rocket share the same basic nihilism about the universe, though they react to it in severely different ways. Rocket’s dour pessimism throughout his Marvel tenure has never prevented him from acting heroically when called upon to do so or from genuinely caring for his friends, but as he admits to Lylla’s spirit in a Near Death Experience, he fundamentally thinks that there is no meaning to his life, and that he and his dead friends were simply “dumb experiments” meant to be thrown away once their purpose was served. It is Lylla who helps Rocket see that “there are the hands that make us, and the hands that guide the hands that make us”: that is, there are the secondary, contingent circumstances of our origins in the world, and the transcendent intentionality that gives rise to each one of us, what any classical theism would call God. The High Evolutionary, by contrast, is incapable of this vision: “There is no God!” he exclaims in the early scenes of the movie’s final battle, “That’s why I stepped in!” One form of nihilism opens up into a renewed encounter with the divine: when we realize that God is not a being among other beings, but the infinite wellspring of Being within which all other beings reside, we stop looking for him out there in the chaos of the world and realize that the world in all its diversity is God’s manifestation to us, just as we are God’s manifestation to the world.

Getting God straight in this way puts the gods in their place; the gods are rarely happy about these demotions, but the theomachy that follows is essential to psychological maturity. Joseph Campbell once said, rightly, that “a god outgrown becomes immediately a life-destroying demon. The form has to be broken and the energies released” (The Hero With A Thousand Faces, 338 fn21). Once we outgrow the gods for God, as the infinite within which our pains and pleasures have always already been reconciled, we find a new energy to work for liberation from demonic menace. The Guardians trilogy works off of this principle, having seen the team face off against multiple demiurgic beings with similar megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur only for the veil to be ripped away and their true nature as obstacles to personal growth revealed. In Vol. 1, the looming threat of Thanos and the present threat of Ronan both revolve around their desire to wield the Power Stone, a weapon we see utilized by the Celestials in the universe’s deep antiquity, is what catalyzes the team’s formation; in Vol. 2, the discovery of Peter’s parentage in Ego, the Living Planet, a malformed Celestial who wants to replace the diversity of living beings with myriad copies of himself, cements their bonds to one another as chosen family. Vol. 3 continues this theme with the High Evolutionary, but instead of creating or holding the team together, the threat this time turns each Guardian to consider how their time with this chosen family now calls them further on in their personal quests for meaning. So Rocket comes to terms with the fact that he is the creation of an evil mad scientist who “hate[s] things the way they are,” and transforms that trauma into the salvation of the High Evolutionary’s next batch of potential victims, who consist of children and animals; Drax realizes that before and after his life as the Destroyer, his real vocation in life is to be a Dad; Peter realizes that while his love for the original Gamorra was genuine and his memories of her are precious, his projections of those memories onto the current Gamorra are preventing him from facing his own past; Mantis realizes that she doesn’t know who she is without the team, and needs to find her own voice; Nebula wants a constructive, not destructive, use for her incredible intelligence and leadership skills.

There’s lots to do with science fiction and fantasy in general in the realms of metaphysics and cosmology: these themes are not exclusive to Gunn or to the Guardians films and to some extent they are found there because Gunn is such an ardent student of the genre and knows its religious, philosophical, and mythological uses. I am usually given to reading such things through those lenses, too, because I think it is important for mental health to keep an active imagination of the strangeness of reality alive for each of us. But as Gunn told an incredibly gut-wrenching, personal story in this film–in the climax of which the heroes save a ship full of children and animals from destruction and nobody dies, which is the only kind of theodicy I’m interested in, the only kind of God I’m interested in, is one who can, at the climax of reality, finally pull that off–it seems to me honoring the spirit of his work to meet him where his interest is, which is always in the way that our human encounters with the divine and the cosmic deepen and expand the contours of our humanity. The curious thing is, of course, that theodicy itself metamorphoses in the context of the personal transformations that make up psychological growth. To the original question: there’s one level of thinking where it makes sense to ask why there’s so much suffering or, conversely, why there’s so much meaning in the universe, and how those two can be reconciled meaningfully. Whether one trends in the direction of atheism or theism at this stage of consciousness, the moral sense of the value of the good can lead us to fight in its defense, however we think these things square off ultimately. But then there’s another level of thinking where the question itself stops making sense, because, paradoxically, the suffering proves to be the vessel of the good, and the good the pretext of the possibility of suffering: the oroboric quality of their relationship leaves us in a sense of mystery, and sometimes nihilistic bewilderment. But there is a further stage beyond this in which we are invited to see that, perhaps, the transcendent reality really is the good, of which our experiences of suffering are merely partial and incomplete visions, that without this liberating insight we can easily become true villains or untested heroes, but with this insight we are empowered to focus on the things that really matter in this life. And what gives me confidence that, whether Gunn would put it this way or not, he is a first-class theologian, are the things that Gunn puts on that list: children, animals, friends, family, love, beauty, and music. Each is, at the end of the day, a far more important theodicy than any theory alone provides.

David Armstrong writes from St. Charles, home of the Legendary Star Lord, and over at A Perennial Digression.