Anthony Hopkins reveals the secret atheist message he put into The Rite

In the exorcism thriller The Rite, Anthony Hopkins plays an unconventional priest locked in mortal combat with Satan. But Hopkins, an agnostic, was uncomfortable with his character - he told us how he slipped a doubter's message into the film.
The Rite opens this weekend, and earlier this month we joined several journalists to interview Hopkins about his role in the movie. When asked what he thought about the movie's paranormal subject matter, Hopkins pointed to a particular line from the movie that he says encapsulates what he believes. And it certainly should - he actually wrote it for his character, the exorcist Father Lucas.
Here's how Hopkins explains the line:

There's a scene in the courtyard after the first exorcism, and I'm talking to the young priest [played by] Colin O'Donoghue, who in his character has grave doubts about [exorcisms]. He thinks it's all a bag of tricks, he thinks it's all mumbo jumbo and maybe there's no such thing, which is the debate: Is there such a thing as anthropomorphic presence of the devil or is it mental disturbance? That's the debate, I guess, in the film and probably in the world.
And after that I say to him the problem with skeptics and atheists, is that we never know the truth. We're always trying to find the truth. What would we do if we found it? And I asked [director Mikael Håfström] if I could write that line. To describe myself as an atheist, as a skeptic which makes the young priest turn [and say], "You?", and I go, "Oh yeah, every day I struggle. Most days. Some days I don't know if I believe in God or Santa Clause or Tinkerbell."

Though it doesn't necessarily contradict what Father Lucas says and does elsewhere in the film, the line certainly complicates his characterization as an untiring warrior against the forces of darkness. As Hopkins explains, it's a line that he wrote because it was important for him to find something of himself in Father Lucas, even if he had to put it there:

It gives a semblance of humanity to somebody who says they don't know...I wrote that. Not because I'm clever. I wrote it because I wanted to fit like a glove a piece of myself in that because that's what I believe. I don't know what I believe, myself personally.

Hopkins then offered his own thoughts on the dangers of being absolutely certain and that, while he himself seems to fall somewhere between atheist and agnostic, the real trick is to leave some room for doubt. Here's his eloquent explanation:

Anyone who says they know, like Colin the young priest [who] says, "I believe in the truth." Oh, the truth, oh yeah, lot of trouble that got us into, didn't it, over the last maybe thousand years? Hitler knew the truth, so did Stalin, so did Mao Zedong, so did the Inquisition. They all knew the truth and that caused such horror. Certainty is the enemy.
It's like anyone saying "the debate is over." Who says it's over? "The debate is over. We know." We? Who? Human beings, we know nothing. And someone says, "But are you an atheist?" Well, I don't know what I believe. But who would I be to refute someone like [German pastor Dietrich] Bonhoeffer who sacrificed his life for his church and ended up in Flossenburg being executed by the Nazis? The great martyrs who died at the stake, destroyed for their personal beliefs. So who am I to refute anything?
"I would hate to live in a world of certainty. Have a closed circuit, a windowless room where I know for certain; like Jean Paul Sartre's [idea] that we're living in Hell, a closed dungeon. I'd rather live with uncertainty because Socrates was told that he was the wisest man in Athens and he said, "Well that's not likely." So he went around looking for people who were wiser than him. And he found one who said, "I'm glad I don't know anything." I think it was Plato who said "Be kind because everyone is fighting a great battle." Whatever the Devil is or is not, I think when we turn our backs on our own frailty and our own humanity and say we know for certain, we know the truth – we are in trouble."

It should be pointed out that this speech was completely unprompted and totally off the cuff, because Anthony Hopkins is awesome. The Rite opens nationwide this Friday.


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The Greek engineer who invented the steam engine 2,000 years ago

Almost two millennia before the rest of humanity entered the industrial age, the Greek inventor Hero invented the steam engine, wind-powered machinery, and theories of light that couldn't be improved for centuries. And then he invented some really crazy stuff.

Scientific geniuses have to pull off a tricky balancing act before they're even born. Great minds like Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton were born at precisely the right time for their ideas to be really revolutionary - just far enough ahead of their time to be trailblazers, but not so far ahead that people had no idea what they were talking about.

Hero of Alexandria

Hero, or Heron, of Alexandria, on the other hand, had the astonishing bad taste to be born around 10 CE, which made his inventions so far ahead of their time that they could be of little practical use and, in time, were forgotten. If he had been born in, say, 1710, his engineering prowess and incredible creativity might have made him the richest person in the world. As it is, he'll just have to settle for the posthumous reputation of being the greatest inventor in human history. Seriously, unless you invent a warp drive tomorrow, there's no way you're catching up to Hero.

We know precious little about where Hero came from, and it's only in the last century that we actually became certain which century he lived in. The best guess is that he was an ethnic Greek born in Egypt in the early decades of the first century CE, one of the many people whose ancestors had emigrated from Greece after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

Hero probably taught at the Musaeum at Alexandria, an institution founded by the Greek rulers of Egypt - you can see an artist's conception of it above. The Musaeum was unlike anywhere else in the ancient Mediterranean, a gathering place for scholars and the sciences that would remain unique until the rise of universities centuries later.