youngpope

I just finished TYP and this is a short rough draft of some ideas that have come to me watching the show. This post could be criticized of being scatterbrained, and I would agree with you. I ask simply for patience in this regard.

Lenny is a Tragic Modulation of Christ, a Loveless Christ. Within the purview of his own psyche, Lenny considers himself morally Good; he expresses his own idea of what constitutes a Good person as follows: One who puts aside all their own temptations and desires to serve others. Since all his thoughts and actions are to serve God, then in his own mind he sees himself as virtuous. But the only reason he is serving God is because he needs God to love him. Lenny is an orphan who was given to a church orphanage by his parents-- the similarity in Lenny's need for validation from his absent parents versus his need for validation from God need not be overstated. Lenny cannot Love because he has lived his life thinking God is dead. "There are some moments, possibly always, where I don't believe."-- If Lenny is The Son then The Father is absent. Clearly this Son-Father relationship isn't just confined to Lenny and God, but rather there are multiple levels of Son-Father relationships in the show. Lenny and God; Lenny and Spencer; and finally Lenny and his actual genetic father. By this same logic, the Son-Mother relationships are Lenny and Love/Holy Spirit(?); Lenny and Mary, Lenny and Esther, and once again Lenny and his genetic mother.

While I think that the Son-Father relationship is fairly simple to grasp, the Son-Mother relationship seems to be more complicated. The Church is typologically female, because the Church (the community of believers) is the Bride of God. The tension that needs to be resolved for Lenny is the transformation from the need for a Mother figure to the need for a Wife, because symbolically speaking that is the only way God and His Church can become wedded to each other and become "one flesh".

The whole drive of the show is that Lenny needs Love from his absent Fathers and needs to detach himself from the cushioning love of his Mother figures to become wed to the Bride. He does this by learning to Love. In doing so he supplants the Father (think of Jesus saying "None shall come to the Father except through me." and Spencer's "You think you're the hinge, but you're the door.") and leaves the Mother (He sends Mary to Africa) while becoming wed to the actual members of the church in the final speech in Venice.

The Young Pope is a Christian love story of love lost and regained.