This is part three of a three-part series on Netflix/BBC’s Dracula. To learn why Dracula’s immortality is a curse, read Part II. As always, spoilers abound.

Introduction

I’ve explored Dracula’s immortality and how it relates to our metaphysical existence beyond death. Then I showed how mortality is a gift, while Dracula’s undying nature is his punishment. Now, I want to examine how the murderous Dracula leads the atheist nun Agatha to believe in God.

Take for instance this exchange in Episode 1:

MINA: Have faith!
AGATHA: Faith is a sleeping draught for children and simpletons. What we must have is a plan.

Harsh words coming from a nun! Agatha’s lack of faith contrasts strikingly with Count Dracula, who for all his vile ways, still acknowledges the reality of a spiritual realm. The storytellers portray him this way from the start of the series. He adamantly believes that the cross, sacramental bread, and holy water can hurt him, and recoils from such objects. He even refuses to step over a circle made of pages from the Bible in Episode 2. In Episode 3, we learn the reason behind this, but before we get to that, I’d like to delve into Dracula’s world-building.

World-building Implications

If the supernatural is real in the world of Dracula, why does this not alter the world view of all the characters involved? I’m still confused as to why Agatha — among others — would doubt the existence of God in a world containing vampires and the Undead. The tangibility of these supernatural elements would have serious implications for everyone’s understanding of faith and the nature of the created universe. This is doubly true of Episode 3 when the story jumps forward to the 21st-century.

This problem relates to the world-building of the show. Since the show is based on an existing book and story world, there are world-building constraints to be concerned with. However, if the storytellers decide to make vampires and the Undead be known phenomena outside of the cloister of the count’s castle, there are serious scientific and religious implications for the world. Even the Greek orthodox priest in Episode 2 already knew what needed to be done to “kill” someone who was Undead — why was this not common knowledge? These types of implications are not taken into account and therefore they erode the suspension of disbelief and internal logic of the story.

Story of Belief

The world at large might be content to ignore evidence of the supernatural, but one person who cannot escape it is Agatha herself. It’s not the existence of supernatural beings that sparks her belief, though. Agatha’s newfound belief comes when Harker explains how his shiny cross necklace reflected the sunlight onto Dracula at the opportune moment, allowing him to escape. This has several problems from a character creation perspective.

Agatha’s change from doubter to believer happens with what could be a coincidence. It occurs seemingly for the plot’s sake; it doesn’t affect her personality or mission through the rest of the series. Both before and after she believes in God, she will stop at nothing to prevent Dracula from winning. Take away her moment of belief and the first episode would hardly change.

This is a problem for the storytellers because it weakens Agatha’s character arc and makes her decision to go from unbeliever to believer relatively moot. Also, her change is instantaneous and transient.

In real life, this type of transition would be an earth-shattering and time-consuming process. Think about it: Agatha has dedicated her life to a religious institution and then become disenchanted upon finding its tenets void. All of a sudden, her faith is restored, and she spends only a moment or two on it? I understand the time constraints of visual storytelling, but there could have been some recognition of her change and its impact on her life. Unfortunately for Netflix/BBC’s Dracula, this religious theme is the icing on the cake rather than its substance.

Agatha’s Argument

It seems that Sister Agatha, for all her struggles, wants to believe. While a desire to believe cannot be a justifiable reason to believe, it can motivate her to seek the truth. Motivation, it seems, is what Agatha lost in her long years of service. She speaks of her search for the divine:

AGATHA: Your faith. I find it touching.
MINA: What happened to yours?
AGATHA: I have looked for God everywhere in this world and never found him.

Later on, another character echoes this sentiment:

“I don’t see the point in praying. God is nowhere.”

This is essentially a simplified version of the Divine Hiddenness argument for atheism, which rose to prominence in the 1990s when fleshed out by philosopher J.L. Schellenberg. In their article titled “Divine Hiddenness and the Nature of Belief” in the Cambridge University academic journal Religious Studies, Poston and Dougherty explain J.L. Schellenberg’s hiddenness argument in layman’s terms:

In short, a loving God would give those individuals willing to believe enough evidence to believe, yet there exist persons willing to believe who lack the crucial evidence.

Daniel Wiley breaks down the theory’s syllogism to expose its strengths and weaknesses. One of his objections is:

Is it not possible that a secular humanistic view of the world, which, by its very nature, attempts to define all life and purpose apart from God, would shape one’s mind in such a way that God becomes unimportant? Might a secular humanistic culture suppress the idea of God and interpret all the evidence God left of himself thought a secular lens and thus reject the idea of God a priori?
As it stands, [Schellenberg’s] only foreseeable option is to approach the nature of God from the Christian worldview, but, as argued above, this worldview is not compatible with the moral neutrality of humanity as asserted by the hiddenness argument, and thus an appeal to the Christian understanding of God is self-defeating.

Spiritual life — and yet spiritual death.

Thornhill labels an epistemological fallacy like Sister Agatha’s as “misbelief” rather than “unbelief”:

Whether that misbelief arose out of a faulty view of God’s presence, love, truthfulness, or relationality, the root of each of these false cognitions is that God’s presence or activity has not met a person’s unrealistic and unbiblical expectations. It is worth noting that studies have found that those who are more involved or committed to their religious beliefs often have the most difficulty when they experience doubts.

If only Agatha had had an intellectually rigorous resource like Dr. J.P. Moreland to help her understand how to hear God’s voice; perhaps she wouldn’t have abandoned her faith.

What is Faith?

Faith, especially in the divine Being, is a commonly misunderstood word and concept. Faith is not necessarily belief without evidence, as lampooned by Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson; faith can also mean trusting because of evidence. It’s this evidence that Agatha has sought her whole life and failed to encounter.

Unlike Agatha, Count Dracula depends on the supernatural for his survival and does not question it. This brings to mind the verse from the New Testament which reads:

You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe — and shudder!
— James 2:19

The irony of this episode is how the actions of the evil Dracula give Agatha a reason to believe! In her quest for victory over evil, Agatha shrewdly calls the vampire’s bluff on multiple occasions, continually experimenting on ways to take Dracula down. At first, she puzzles over why the mighty Dracula cows before a crucifix and other religious icons. Rev. Peter Laws expounds:

[The show] just keeps asking “why does the cross have power?” Not if it has power, but why. This story seems to make the inherent power a given.
In episode two, the count simply dismisses the power of the cross with a clever theory. He says he’s sucked so much peasant blood over the years, he’s imbibed some of their foolish religious fear. [Creators] Gattis and Moffat could have left it at this rather nifty explanation, but they don’t, because Sister Agatha knows better. She accuses Dracula of lying, not only to her but more importantly to himself. There is something far more profound in the cross that makes the Count fear it. There is a goodness there, and he knows it.

Beneath his facade of pomp and devilish wit, Dracula shares the same weakness with mankind. Though he claims to be the master of the undead, death is Dracula’s master. In an attempt to prevent the unpreventable, he keeps his enemy closer than a brother. To wit: it’s revealed in Episode 3 that all of Dracula’s weaknesses (sunlight, crosses, garlic, etc.) are a creation of his subconscious.

In reality, he fears the cross because it represents death, especially a willing and righteous death for others. He is so ashamed of being afraid to die, he allows his pride of life to take over, cementing his shame in superstitious fears which he comes to believe. His fear of the cross represents a belief in it, though he would never admit it.

Source: American Zoetrope/Columbia Pictures

State of Death Denial

Dracula’s unconscious avoidance of his own death correlates to humanity’s constant denial of death. Someone who is intimately in touch with death — a mortician named Caitlin Doughty — eloquently states this irony:

Death doesn’t go away just because we hide it. Hiding life’s truths doesn’t mean they disappear. It means they are forced into darker parts of our consciousness.

Fear of death keeps Dracula alive. He kills others to live in his fear. He inflicts death to avoid his own; in that way, he shares a common enemy with his victims: Death.

Dracula professes to be immortal, and he functionally is within the story. Why does the blood-sucking “gentleman” fear death? Because his immortality is unnatural. To put it another way, his inability to die is a violation of natural law. That’s why, if you’ll remember from Part II, Agatha refers to mortality as a “divine ability.” Nevertheless, gifted with mortality as we are, it still seems painful and hollow to many.

Human Desire for Immortality

Death is not just inevitable, it’s necessary; yet, people seek to escape by any way they can. Even though we can logically reason that physical immortality would be senseless, humanity still fears the unknowns that death brings and longs for immortality despite itself. E.J. Carnell eloquently captures this:

Man appears to be literally suspended between heaven and earth, between the ideal and the real, between the desirable and the actual.
He longs for a strong body, but the lethal germs cut short the hope. He prays for another day to live, but the scythe of death cuts him down. He trusts in marble monuments, only to have the earth beneath them buckle and crumble. Whatever man achieves, the universe seems determined that the weeds of time and indifference cover it over. Every cultural expression has the same verdict written over it: This is doomed to decay! What sense is there in such a universe? And who is responsible for this monstrous situation?

The failure to be able to unite the real and the ideal presses home to man a strange impelling sense of the futility and absurdity of life. There is no castle that man can build which will last forever…the same decree of decay is written over it as is written over everything which man undertakes.
The incongruity between man’s desire for life and the reality of physical death is the most maddening problem of all. Although he sees the handwriting on the wall, man yet refuses to think that death is his final destiny, that he will perish as the fish and the fowl, and that his place will be remembered no more. Man wills to live forever; the urge is written deep in his nature.

Spiritual Life?

This leaves us with a seemingly irreconcilable dilemma: on the one hand, physical death is feared because we know not what lies beyond it; separated from God, all are in a state of spiritual death. On the other hand, there must be life after death, or else morality would be without purpose.

Spiritual life — and yet spiritual death. Allow me to explain.

Physical death comes to all, yes. Then a person’s existence is metaphysical, and his or her being persists eternally. In what state shall a person persist? That depends on one’s spiritual state during life. As noted above, according to the biblical paradigm that Sister Agatha and Dracula ascribe to, to be spiritually dead is the default human condition — even for a functionally immortal vampire. Fortunately, there’s a cure for this condition: the Lamb who was slain to take away the stain of sin from each one of us.

Matt Smethurt, meditating on death and immortality, summarizes this biblical worldview thusly:

This is the harsh truth that Dracula hides from due to his shame, and the truth Sister Agatha accepts thanks to Dracula’s machinations.

Summary

In Part I, I showed how Dracula’s immortality works, and how it correlates to real-life existence in a metaphysical sense. In Part II, we plumbed the abyss of mortality and discovered treasure rather than despair.

Here, I’ve shown how Agatha’s sudden change of heart should have been considered more thoughtfully from both a world-building and character arc perspective by the writers. Plus, Agatha’s initial misbelief against faith from Divine Hiddenness is emotionally compelling but logically inadequate. Finally, we examined how the nun Agatha’s journey mirrors that of Dracula, and how the horror series shows humanity’s fear of death dredges up its desire for immortality. Death is Count Dracula’s biggest enemy, but there’s Good News: Death has been defeated.

Dracula's Biggest Enemy: Part III