Signs of the Human Condition: Halo 1-3

Some Backstory First

The Pillar of Autumn approaching Halo Installation 04.

Halo: Combat Evolved starts off in the middle of space with a strange ring-shaped planet in view orbiting an even larger planet called Threshold with a male and female voice dialoguing about, "Did we lose them?"  A large freighter called The Pillar of Autumn is on approarch to this ring world.  The gamer doesn't yet know who "they" are, we find out the male voice to be Captain Keyes, and we're left in wonderment as to who this female voice could be, whom we soon learn to be Cortana, who appears as a strange little humanoid hologram—a "smart" AI.  Eventually the cutscene introduces the main character you play as: Master Chief Petty Officer SPARTAN-117, John.  You soon find out that you have to protect Cortana from the enemy—a menagerie of hostile and religious fanatic aliens who call themselves the Covenant.  If the Covenant captures Cortana, they'll have access to a wealth of information beneficial to their religious cause but extremely detrimental to the existence of the human race: force deployment, weapons research, and most important of all, the location of Earth.

The Covenant: Elite, Engineer, Prophet, Hunter, Jackal, Brute, Grunt.

Upon landing on the strange ring-shaped world, which we learn to be called Halo, the overall mission is one of survival.  Immediately it begins off with fighting your way through Covenant forces to rescue Marines who were survivors of The Pillar of Autumn.  Eventually, you learn that after Captain Keyes crash lands The Pillar of Autumn, the Covenant captured him and you embark on a rescue mission.  After rescuing him, you finally learn what Halo is.  Apparently Halo is some sort of weapon, but it's not entirely clear yet what type of weapon it is.  All we know is that it's bad news and we can't let it fall into the hands of the Covenant.

Upon rescuing Captain Keyes, you embark on another mission to locate the "silent cartographer," which is a map room of Halo.  The purpose of locating it is to find the control room of Halo to perhaps discover more information about what exactly Halo was designed to do.  However, events start to turn when Cortana, as she's in Halo's systems, learns something horrific and demands the Master Chief to find Captain Keyes and stop him.  The gamer, as well as the Master Chief, is left in confusion as to what this danger could be as the next mission starts, but we're not left in suspense for long.

The Flood: Infection Form

The Flood: Combat Form (Human)

The Master Chief arrives at the location where Captain Keyes was last reported to be heading, and it's a facility filled with mystery.  There's destruction and death caused by an unknown source.  Upon investigating, the Master Chief eventually stumbles across the last known location of Captain Keyes and the Marines he was with.  Inside the facility, the Chief opens a door as a Marine's corpse collapses into his arms.  He walks in, picks up a Marine's fallen helmet, takes out its chip recording and places it in his own helmet, and watches the horror.  He watches the video as Captain Keyes and the Marines walk into the room he's in now, and out of nowhere these strange little ball-shaped creatures with disgusting tentacles come out (above).  There are hundreds of them, and every single Marine, including Captain Keyes, perishes.  Upon taking the recording chip out, the Master Chief now finds that he has to fight his way through these strange creatures, coming across new humanoid forms that were once human (left) and others that used to be Elites, a warrior class alien race in the Covenant.

343 Guilty Spark

Once outside the facility and fighting your way through the horde of this new species, you stumble across an odd ball-shaped machine who calls himself 343 Guilty Spark (right), an AI created by the Forerunners with the duty to protect the Halo installation he was assigned to.  Without your consent, he teleports you to another facility called "the Library" to retrieve a device called the Icon that, according to Guilty Spark, will destroy this alien species called the Flood.  You learn that they are a parasitic life form that inhabits any sentient being that is edible.  To the Flood, every living species is equally edible.  After retrieving the Icon, Guilty Spark teleports you to the control room, where Cortana still remains.  You place the Icon into the control room, and it doesn't work because Cortana stops it.  You watch as her large hologram zooms out of the control centre, and she is angry.


Now we finally learn the true purpose of Halo: Halo was designed not to destroy the Flood, but to wipe its food—every sentient being in the galaxy.  "The only way to destroy the Flood is to starve them to death," Cortana reports.  So, Guilty Spark only told a half truth.  By activating the Halo ring, every living thing would be destroyed: humans, the Covenant, and inevitably the Flood.

2 of 3 Prophet Hierarchs: Truth & Mercy

What Halo was designed to do is the premise upon which the first trilogy takes place.  In Halo 2, we learn that there are a total of 7 Halo rings.  Throughout Halo 2 and Halo 3 we learn of the Covenant's real intentions.  The Covenant is endeavouring to use the Halo rings not only to destroy the Flood, but all humans as well.  The Covenanta leaders, known as the Prophet Hierarchs (above), are aware that this means the Covenant would be destroyed as well.  However, the ancient alien race that they worship as gods who built the Halo rings, called the Forerunners, also built what are called shield worlds, where one can remain safe from Halo's destruction.  The Covenant's plan was to activate the Halo rings to destroy all living things while they remained safe in a shield world.

If we read the books, we discover that the Prophet Hierarchs gave second chances to all the other races currently in the Covenant.  All the other species currently a part of it originally defied the Covenant, but eventually they all conformed with the persuasion of the Prophets.  So if all these other species didn't have a chance, why didn't they give that chance to humans?  In the book, we learn that the Prophets view the humans as gross heretics, for they have used and destroyed the Forerunners' technology for their own purposes.  The Prophets, and the Covenant, view these technological devices as relics and consider it the highest offence of heresy to use and destroy these relics (which is extremely hypocritical because they use Forerunner technology to create new weapons and ships, but they added to their already self-created scripture to justify these actions).  So, instead of giving the humans a chance to join their cause, they sought to destroy them outright.  But let's face it, it is doubtful that the humans would've joined their religiously fanatic cause at all.

The Human Condition

Medieval torture instruments.

In this way, the Covenant is similar to the First Crusade committed by the Catholic Church from 1096-1099 to kill all pagans and heretics, as well as to regain control of the holy site Jerusalem.  Instead of preaching the Gospel to the pagans and attempting to reform the false teachings of the heretics, the Catholic Church instead endeavoured to kill them.  The First Crusade is where we see some of the worst medieval torturing.  If you pleaded guilty to heresy, you were tortured and killed.  If you pleaded innocence, you were tortured and killed.  There was no mercy.  Similarly, the Covenant was merciless towards the heretical humans and were brutal in their war tactics and torture techniques the few times they took prisoners.

The Covenant is indicative of the human condition that chooses to function with the Law rather than the Gospel.  The Prophet Hierarchs tried arduously to convert the current members of the Covenant, but when they came across the humans who committed acts that they viewed as unforgivable, no mercy was shown.  To Christians, heresy is a gross sin, and rightly so.  To the Covenant, the grossest form of heresy was the use and destruction of Forerunner relics, despite their own hypocrisy in the matter.  Indeed, the Catholic Church was ignorant of their own hypocrisy for the heretical beliefs they held (e.g. the sacrament of penance, works-based salvation).  Instead of winning them over, both sought to annihilate these heretics.

The Covenant were fooled in that they thought the Forerunners were gods who disappeared because they ascended to the "Great Journeys," becoming gods in this way.  So the beliefs of the Covenant were that if they activated the Halo rings they, too, would embark on the Great Journey and become gods.  So, the Forerunner race became false gods to the Covenant.  It is arguable that Christ was absent in the Catholic Church during the First Crusade.  After all, if Christ were present, the Catholic Church would not have called for a Crusade in the first place.  The Catholic Church didn't worship Christ; they worshipped idolatry in the form of antipathy.  Jesus said, "The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure brings forth evil" (Matthew 12:35).  Because heresy angered the Catholic Church so much, hatred burned in their hearts, and out of the evil of their hearts they called for a Crusade to kill and torture all heretics.  It didn't matter whether the accused were actually heretics or not.  If they merely thought you to be a heretic, you were guilty and suffered the consequences.

A WBC fool picketing.

Perhaps most exemplary of the Covenant today is the Westboro Baptist Church.  Instead of preaching repentance with the Gospel, all they preach is Law and its condemnation.  They pray for the deaths of homosexuals, soldiers, and others.  Their minds are so distorted that they rightly acknowledge the sin of homosexuality, but instead of preaching a message of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ who loves us and desires that we live holy lives, they preach a message of condemnation with the Law.  And their minds are so distorted that they have created false sins, such as service in the military.  A church or religion that functions merely by Law lacks the compassion, love, grace, and mercy of Christ necessary to bring people to salvation in Him alone.  The human condition is to sin, and this is perhaps the grossest sin that one can commit while claiming to be a Christian.  It is a false Christianity.  It is not a church where Christ dwells.

Sometimes when sin angers us, it can anger us so much that we fall into a condition of hate.  It is a dangerous path to take, for this path can lead us away from Christ.  The Covenant followed this same pattern.  They showed mercy to the current members of the Covenant, but in their astonished response to the humans' actions they responded with hatred and showed no mercy (in spite of their false religion).  In the same way, we can become just as hateful when a sin offends us.  The WBC is a prime example.  But even if one is not a part of this false church, the individual Christian may still fall into this pattern.  It is right to hate sin: "O you who love the LORD, hate evil!" (Psalm 97:10).  However, we must not fall into the danger of hating the sinner.  If we find ourselves falling into this danger, we must immediately pray that the Lord changes and transforms our hearts into one of love, grace, mercy, and compassion so that we will be better equipped to preach the Gospel message of Jesus Christ.