If the fall of the Old English hero Beowulf can be traced to such a flaw in the original versions of the tale, that flaw would have to be hubris. He who won renown by defeating the monstrous Grendel and killing his still more dangerous mother decides, years later, to take on a dragon who has been ravaging the villages under his protection. Convinced that he can best this adversary in single combat as he has others, Beowulf neglects to request the assistance of his fellow warrior, Wiglaf, an old friend who steps in to assist our hero only after he has been mortally wounded by the winged beast. Though the injured Beowulf retains enough strength to aid Wiglaf, his own fate is sealed: the epic poem concludes with the Geats bemoaning his passing.

Pride may well be the most common failing of the western hero. Some may falter due to sloth, stumble over greed, or fall down as a consequence of ill-placed wrath, but whatever problems they have can usually be traced back to an overvaluation of their own merit and position relative to that of others.

Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf (2007) mixes things up a bit. He retains the titular warrior's original obsession with personal glory, but recasts the route to destruction as one which leads, not across a gently inclined path paved by arrogance, but down a steep slope slicked by sexual desire.

When this new Beowulf arrives in the lair of Grendel's mother to kill her, he finds, not a dangerous grotesque, but a dangerously seductive woman. Her offer to magically advance him to kingship and a long, successful reign if he will only impregnate her plays on his desire for glory, but has more to do with his physiology-driven longing for sexual pleasure. If momma monster did not resemble a naked Angelina Jolie, the film implies, Beowulf would have had little difficulty rejecting her proposal.

This mortgaging of his soul brings Beowulf repeat victories in battle and widespread renown, but also mars the finish of his success; his consciousness of a profound moral failure sucks the joy out of his martial triumphs, drains the passion from his marriage to a devoted beauty, and slowly replaces his old self-confidence with a death wish (which the plot gratifies in dramatic, heroic fashion). This modern, fatal pairing of pride with that other sin which--of the medieval period's Deadly Seven--is viewed with the greatest clemency in pieces like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Dante's Inferno, applies surprising gravity to illicit sex.

The film also suggests, however, that this is the one transgression that cannot be avoided. Beowulf's trespass echoes that of the Danish king Hrothgar, and prefigures that of Wiglaf, who in the final scene looks ready to jump into the seductress's arms himself. All three of the film's heroes appear constitutionally unable to resist sexual temptation. Ultimately, the adaptation penned by Roger Avary and popular comic writer Neil Gaiman appears to question whether Beowulf's yielding to lust might just be less a failure than it is a natural--inevitable--response to overpowering stimuli.

This very issue appears to be the primary beef Hollywood and the literati have with Christianity lately. It's not so much the believer's acceptance of an invisible God, nor the devotion to a religion so often misemployed to rationalize the worst kinds of atrocities. No, what really gets the goat of today's artistic intelligentsia is the conscious control the Christian attempts to exert--however imperfectly--over his/her sexuality at both a behavioral and psychological level. It seems the worst kind of psychic castration to so tightly rein in what is quite material, immediate, and demanding. Monogamy is old hat, an unnecessary and unnatural covering that obscures the sight and binds the brain.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the message sometimes sent by the modern Christian, whose personal struggles to refine and focus sexual passion sometimes translate into a loud, public decrial of desire itself as innately sinful instead of a God-given good. What is needed in today's churches is a judicious but joyful celebration of sex--a greater willingness to broach the topic in the pulpit, Bible study, and Sunday school class. Instead of obliquely alluding to the topic because of children sitting in the auditorium, or darting past it when its presence just cannot be ignored, those declaiming the Truth need to slow down and open up dialogue about this facet of human existence.

Maybe if we did this, the sexual practices of Christians would actually begin to differ from those outside the faith.