Paul Tournier (1898-1986) argued that a person needs a place before he can become a person, and that the place is granted, not achieved. In A Place for You he set out an order of operations he found running through Scripture: attachment first, then detachment. God gives Israel a land before God tells Abraham to leave his father’s house. A man must possess a place before he can renounce it, and the renunciation must be his own act, performed from possession. Tournier reserved the command to leave for God and the leaving for the man. He had a name for renunciation imposed on someone who has not finished possessing. He called it cruelty, whatever its motive.
Two cases test the corollary his books circle without quite stating: what happens when the one who grants a man his place also administers its withdrawal. One case is fiction, Salvatore Di Vita of Giuseppe Tornatore’s (b. 1956) Cinema Paradiso, in the fifty-minute-longer director’s cut of 2002, where the film discloses what its grantor did. The other is documentary, the Australian theologian Desmond Ford (1929-2019). A booth and a pulpit, a projectionist and a committee, and the same transaction underneath: the hand that gave took back.
Begin with the grants, which run parallel. Both boys start placeless. Salvatore is fatherless, the father lost in Russia in the war, in a poor Sicilian town whose one public room is the movie house. Ford was born on February 2, 1929, in Townsville, Queensland, to an Anglican family religious on paper only, in a home that supplied a roof more than a place; his refuge was novels. Each boy receives his place in adolescence from outside the family. Alfredo the projectionist resists Salvatore, then teaches him, then hands him the booth, and when fire blinds Alfredo the child takes a man’s chair. The Adventists of Townsville befriend Ford, feed him, argue with him, and in September 1946, at seventeen, he is baptized over his brother’s opposition and his mother’s resistance. Both grants come attached to a person and a discipline, and both exact a toll at the threshold. Salvatore surrenders an ordinary childhood to the booth. Ford, reading Ellen G. White (1827-1915) on the dangers of amusement, gives up novels and gives up the cinema. One boy pays for his place with the movies. The other boy’s place is a movie house. Tournier would not have made the joke, and the symmetry stands without it.
Both men then build outward from the grant, the first movement performed at full strength. Salvatore runs the booth for years and films the town with a hand camera; the vocation forms inside the place. Ford graduates from Avondale College in 1950, enters the ministry, marries, takes a doctorate from Michigan State in 1960 and a second from Manchester in 1972 under F. F. Bruce (1910-1990), chairs the Avondale theology department from 1961 to 1977, and grants places in turn, sending a generation of Australian ministers out of his classroom. By the frame’s arithmetic both men reach possession. The difference that decides everything comes later, and it is a difference of timing, not of kind.
Now the withdrawals. Alfredo’s is the stranger case because it wears the face of love. He tells Salvatore the booth is slavery and the town a trap, and he commands the departure: leave, never return, never write, forget us. In the director’s cut the film shows how far he went. When Elena comes to the booth in 1954 to reconcile, Alfredo intercepts her message and persuades her to vanish, judging that love might chain the boy to Giancaldo as the booth had chained him. He does not merely command Abraham’s departure. He engineers it, removing the one attachment that might have competed, then performs the renunciation on Salvatore’s behalf. Ford’s withdrawal wears the face of procedure. His address of October 27, 1979, at Pacific Union College argued that the investigative judgment, the doctrine that Christ began reviewing the records of believers in 1844, lacked biblical support and clouded the assurance of salvation by grace. The church granted him leave, received his manuscript of nearly a thousand pages, convened more than a hundred scholars and administrators at Glacier View, Colorado, in August 1980, and revoked his credentials the following month. He was fifty-one.
The motives diverge and the frame declines to be impressed by the divergence. Alfredo acts for the boy, the committee for the institution, and under Tournier’s rule the form condemns them both, because each usurps the second movement. The command to leave belonged to no projectionist and no committee. What the frame does register, and what makes the pairing more than a rhyme, is where each man stood in the first movement when the withdrawal came. Salvatore’s adult place was in formation. Elena was a place being granted, marriage the central adult instance of place given by a person, and Alfredo reached it before it set. Ford’s place had set for thirty-four years. He possessed; Salvatore was still receiving. The same act, performed at those two moments, produces opposite men.
It produces, first, opposite responses. Salvatore obeys. For thirty years he keeps the ban, does not return, does not write, does not answer his mother’s calls, and becomes a famous director in Rome. Ford disobeys. He joins no other denomination, and for thirty-nine years he sits in the pews of the body that defrocked him, keeping the Sabbath, keeping the vegetarian table, commending White’s writings devotionally while denying them canonical rank, and preaching justification by faith through Good News Unlimited, a ministry of radio and mailing lists gathering the displaced, among them the hundred-odd ministers who left the Australian ministry in his wake. The obedient man and the refusing man; and the frame’s finding is that the labels invert on inspection. Salvatore’s compliance is the deeper captivity. He carries the extraction without knowing its address, and his Roman life shows the standard signature, women in series, no marriage, achievement as a strong reaction covering a hole its owner cannot see. Rome is a camp pitched at maximum distance from the gate, which is still a camp. Ford’s refusal, on the generous reading his composure supports, is the conduct of a man whose place had migrated from the institution to the message and become portable, so that a vote in Colorado could reach his credentials and not his ground. A place possessed before the withdrawal survives it. A place stolen during formation leaves a man who does not know what he lost, only that everything since has been staged.
Each case ends with a document, and the documents run in opposite directions. Alfredo leaves Salvatore the reel of censored kisses, every cut the priest ordered spliced end to end, the projectionist returning what he removed, from the screen and from the life; a confession in celluloid, delivered after death because it could not be spoken. Ford’s document went the other way, from the expelled man to the grantor: a thousand pages of exegesis on Daniel 8:14 addressed to the committee that held the deed, a plea that the place be maintained on the merits. Neither document works as its author intended. The committee read the manuscript and revoked the credentials anyway. The reel arrives decades too late to restore what it confesses, and the middle-aged Elena, when Salvatore finds her, gives him one night and declines the rest, because a place cannot be regranted, only visited. The two failures teach the same clause of the frame: paper and film can record a place, plead for it, even confess its theft, and cannot hold it, because places pass between persons or not at all.
The endings complete the chiasm. Salvatore’s place is demolished; he returns once, watches the Paradiso fall for a parking lot, and receives the reel. Ford’s place still stands, holding services on the town squares of the world, and he sat in it until he died on March 11, 2019, on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, the state where he began. The fictional man loses the building and may have recovered the substance in a projection room in Rome, weeping at the kisses. The historical man kept the substance and never got the building back, and by most accounts did not rage over it. Fiction has the advantage here, and the pairing should admit it: the camera watched Alfredo intercept the note, so the theft is established, while biography must infer its withdrawals from minutes and memoirs. The frame reads both, and reads the fictional case with more warrant than the real one.
What the pairing yields, beyond the symmetries, is a sharpened statement of Tournier’s rule. The withdrawal of a place is survivable in proportion to how far the first movement has run. Take a man’s place after he possesses it and you take his personage, his credentials, his booth, his pulpit, and possibly leave the person standing. Take it while the grant is still setting and you take the person’s foundation, and he may spend thirty years mistaking the theft for his own renunciation. And a second clause follows for grantors. Alfredo, who had rotted inside a place and loved the boy, and Glacier View, which had a doctrine to protect and did not love the man, arrive at the same verdict under the rule, because the rule attends to the act. The second movement cannot be performed for another man. It can only be stolen from him, and the theft is not annulled by good motives, or by a bequest of kisses, or by the thief’s own suffering in the place he could not leave. Whether it can be forgiven is a question for the men involved, and both stories, the invented one and the lived one, end short of answering it.
