Veritable with Emma

The Christian vision does not promise that love will be easy, or that sacrifice will not cost anything. It promises something better: that love given freely, in the form it was made for, will ultimately heal what power never can.

*A response to Carrie Gress’s “Hamnet and the Quiet Triumph of the Christian Patriarchy”*

https://theologyofhome.substack.com/p/hamnet-and-the-quiet-triumph-of-the

—

Carrie Gress has written something rare: a piece of cultural criticism that manages to be both warmly appreciative and sharply perceptive. Her reading of Hamnet, the acclaimed film about the Shakespeare family’s grief over the loss of their young son‚ draws out a contrast that the film itself seems almost to stumble upon accidentally. And that accidental quality is exactly what makes it so compelling.

The contrast she identifies is ancient, but it has never felt more urgent: the difference between what paganism and Christianity ask of men and women, and what kind of human being each vision ultimately produces.

—

Two Visions, Two Destinations

At the heart of Gress’s essay is a deceptively simple observation: “Paganism is about power, and Christianity is about flourishing.” These are not just different means to the same end. They point toward entirely different destinations‚ different answers to the question of what a good human life looks like.

The pagan vision, as Gress sees it embodied in the film’s Agnes, is one of self-possession and self-sufficiency. Agnes the witch knows things. She can deliver her own baby in the woods. She has access to hidden forces. She goes it alone. There is something seductive in this image‚ the self-reliant woman who answers to no one, bends the natural world to her will, and refuses to be hemmed in by convention or community.

But Gress asks us to look more carefully at where this vision actually leads. The answer the film quietly gives, perhaps despite its own intentions, is: anxiety, resentment, confusion, and isolation. Power that answers only to itself does not produce peace. It produces a person increasingly unable to give or receive the very things that make life worth living.

The Christian vision is different in kind, not just in degree. It does not begin with power but with gift‚ the recognition that one’s life is not primarily something to be seized and wielded, but something to be offered. Gress finds this vision embodied in Shakespeare the father and Hamnet the son: men who protect, provide, and ultimately lay down their lives for others. Not as an act of defeat, but as the fullest expression of what they were made to be.

—

What Men Are For, and What Women Are For

This is where the essay becomes most thought-provoking, because it challenges the terms in which we typically debate these questions.

Contemporary culture tends to frame the aspirations of men and women in identical language: autonomy, achievement, self-determination. The question is always “what can you do?” and “who can stop you?” Paganism and its modern heirs‚ including, Gress argues, much of contemporary feminism‚ accept this framing entirely. They simply want women to have access to the same power-centered vision that they assume men have always operated by.

But Gress suggests this is a false premise. The Christian tradition does not offer men a vision of domination that women are then denied. It offers *both* men and women a vision centered not on power but on love‚ and more specifically, on the kind of love that gives of itself for others.

For men, this looks like Shakespeare: the father who forms his son in courage and self-sacrifice, who grieves not loudly but productively, who restores his family through the patient work of his craft. For women, it looks like motherhood at its most luminous‚ which Gress finds not in Agnes’s solitary witchery, but in Jessie Buckley’s (the actress in the film) own radiant acceptance speech, where she declared her love for her husband, honored the lineage of mothers who “continued to create against all odds,” and expressed her joy in creating life with her husband, together.

That is a woman oriented toward flourishing‚ toward life, relationship, and the generous outpouring of self‚ rather than toward power and independence as ends in themselves.

—

The Patriarchy Nobody Admits They Want

One of the most penetrating moments in Gress’s essay is her observation that even people formed by feminist assumptions find themselves moved by what Shakespeare does in the film. They appreciate it. They are grateful for it. They count on it.

This is not hypocrisy‚ it is evidence of something deeper. The longing for men who protect and provide, who love with gravity and steadiness, who transmit courage to their children, is not a cultural artifact that feminism has successfully dismantled. It is written into human nature. It persists even when the ideology says it shouldn’t.

Real patriarchy, as Gress carefully defines it, has nothing to do with domination or neglect. It is gift, not grasping. It is the man who shows up, stays present, and gives himself away‚ like Shakespeare transforming his grief into *Hamlet*, like young Hamnet hearing his father’s voice in his heart and stepping forward to die in his sister’s place.

That is not a vision of power. That is a vision of love. And it is, Gress argues, distinctively and essentially Christian.

—

Why This Matters Now

It matters because the choice between these two visions is not abstract. It plays out in families, in marriages, in the formation of children, and in the quiet decisions people make about what kind of person they want to become.

A culture that mistakes power for wisdom‚ that sees Agnes’s solitary self-sufficiency as something to emulate‚ will produce more anxiety, more resentment, more confusion, more isolation. It will produce people who are very good at protecting themselves and very poor at giving themselves away.

A culture that recovers the Christian vision of self-gift‚ for men *and* for women, each in their particular way‚ will produce something different. Not perfection, and not without suffering. The Shakespeares lose their son. Their marriage nearly breaks apart under the weight of grief. But they find their way back, not through power, but through the patient, sacrificial work of love.

That is the quiet triumph Gress is pointing toward. And she is right to name it.

—

*The Christian vision does not promise that love will be easy, or that sacrifice will not cost anything. It promises something better: that love given freely, in the form it was made for, will ultimately heal what power never can.*