The Silence Of God
The second entry in what has been dubbed as the “Silence of God” trilogy is hard to describe in itself. 80 minutes packed with the most profound type of crisis: that of faith in a modern world with a beautiful cinematography that is characteristic of Bergman.
Bergman worked repeatedly with the cast of this film, namely, Björnstrad, Thulin, von Sydow. I believe they just shared some of the concerns Bergman himself had for they portray these characters so vividly that it is hard to think of other actors for the roles.
If one is to consider Ozu’s canonical theme, it would be that of family; whereas if one is to do the same with Bergman, at least in this trilogy, it is that of faith. These two however never exhuast their respective themes in the wildly divergent films they craft, they just present it from another perspective, another glance into the nature of the unnameable, the ungraspable.
Modernity and the nature of Faith
As it is commonly known, there are three Bergman’s movies which deal with the Silence of God, namely, Såsom i en spegel (1961), Nattvardsgästerna (1963) and Tystnaden (1963). However, I would add that Det sjunde inseglet (1957) is also, thematically, a part of this collection.
In that 1957 film where Antonius, the medieval knight that just came back from the Crusades, is asking desperately, where God is. This questioning is repeated throughout Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light, where the answer is always slightly different.
Although The Seventh Seal is not accurate in its depiction of the Middle Ages, what seems to matter is the representation of a new kind of doubt that is present in all of Modernity: everything has to be subject to constant questioning, à la Descartes.
As stated before elsewhere, Through a Glass Darkly can be said to treat the vanishing of what makes Western society Western: by getting rid of God, chaos is introduced to our lives. What we (as society) once deemed to be the most respectful and divine is then turned to be the most despised in our society.
I believe that Bergman is always forcing us to reflect upon our own status in religious (or spiritual) terms versus our time and place in the modern world. Does a religion (obviously, for historical reasons, a Judeo-Christian one) make sense in a world where things are explained in mere logical and scientific terms? Is our ever-increasing control and domination of the Earth not effectively relegates our need for an allogical explanation of the world?
Bergman is always playing with this duality: on the one hand, Judeo-Christian religions promised us a better world, maybe here on Earth, maybe elsewhere. That is why the birth of Christ is the start of a new Era: from this moment onwards society is going to be better, since God has cleansed our sins. But, as it is shown time and again, this promise turns to be empty: the epidemic that is seen in The Seventh Seal is clear indication of this. So, humans turn to certainty, to a promise that has been proven to be delivered over and over again.
Yet treading too much into one side of the balance also makes society wonder what this logical yet empty way of seeing the world is promising us. The fact that our lives will be objectively better at the cost of a life that at times seems a void, lacking any subjective meaning on itself.
The Silence of God to a priest
All of what has been said applies to the movies that have been already mentioned, but in Winter Light it is none other than a priest the one who is experiencing this sense of crisis. And it is also a nice detail to name this struggling priest Tomas, for he is doubting the Lord.
The viewers find Tomas giving his service to a handful of people, and even those are not well aware of the customs of the mass. Jonas and his wife are clearly not accustomed to attending these since they clumsily follow the other attenders. And the viewer also sees the organist eager to finish this service to do what he pleases elsewhere.
The community Tomas’ church serves to seems to be indifferent to the services. May very well be that they stopped believing altogether, or they are having serious doubts, such as Jonas, which in time tells Tomas that he has trouble with his belief in this day and age.
Tomas is uncapable of reassuring Jonas of his faith, for he is a non-believer as well, as he eventually points out, in what I believe to be the key moment in the entire film. In Through a Glass Darkly, the viewers are constantly presented with the Bergman juxtaposition: two characters sharing the spot but they are opposing, they are not in line with one another. In this key scene, where this juxtaposition is found only once in this film, Tomas is opposed Jonas, until the very moment Tomas accepts this severe truth.
I believe that, given their closeness thematically and also geographically, Kierkegaard can shed some light into this problem. For Kierkegaard (more precisely, for Johannes de Silentio), there are two ways to approach the problem of faith, that of the knight of infinite resignation, who resigns to the goods in this life in order to gain those in the next one; and that of the knight of faith, who is able to value these goods in this life since God provides not only in the afterlife but in this one as well.
Tomas is, at the moment where he shares Jonas’ doubts, a knight of infinite resignation. He has given up on the idea of God for it is easier to explain the world without it. This goes in line with him being in the ethical stage of Kierkegaard. He cares for others and can tell good from evil apart and has a sense of commitment to his community, but he is not entirely so. This precise moment in which they are together is the first movement into the knight of infinite resignation.
Whenever Algot gives his monologue to Tomas, the viewer witnesses something in Tomas changes, for Algot asks the ultimate question: “Wasn’t God’s silence worse?”. Theologically, it is impossible for God to stop being silent, since He would have to stop being transcendent to become immanent and participate in the imperfection of language, whereas He is perfect.
It is also important to note the fact that Kierkegaard also treats this issue in Fear and Trembling, where he goes by Johannes de Silentio, i.e. John of the Silence. There is a paradox in Christianity because this will never be “proved” to us and God will forever remain silent, but a qualitative leap is needed for us to believe, i.e., faith begets faith.
It is this speech, as viewers see in the final scene, that makes Tomas do the next movement in order to become a knight of faith: even though I have no proof of this, I believe in this, because, by virtue of the fact that for and by God all things are possible. He not only understand that he will receive all things in this life but he is truly himself after that, for in becoming a knight of faith the heavens are open and the individual receives oneself.
By giving himself to his faith, he is now the closest he can ever be to God, and as such, he is willing to perform His duties even if there is no one around to witness it. He is no longer responding to mortals, but to God himself.
A God-less world and life
After the crucial exchange between Tomas and Jonas, viewers are shown that the latter went on to find an empty world and committed suicide. As Western societies have tried to get rid of Judeo-Christian ideas from their lives, an empty shell is what is left. The West is then faced with the impossible task to answer to the only relevant philosophical question, according to Camus: are we to kill ourselves?
The empty shell that is modern society, once ripped from its foundational core, leaves the question of what to do with the absurd, i.e., with the infinite universe that does not care in the slightest about us but to which we so desperately try to make sense out of.
For Camus, suicide is never justified for the human has to exist to be in opposition of this world that does not care about anything for the absurd to exist. Humans are needed for this contradiction to exist but it can never be accepted by them.
The modern human is no different than Sisyphus, claims Camus. For they are forced to perform futile tasks everyday, without any change in their lifes. This is no different than the rock that Sisyphus has to carry up to the mountain each day.
This, however, is only tragic in rare moments when the person becomes conscious of their situation. Yet this situation is not to discourage them, for noticing this should only lead to acknowledge it in order to conquer it. The absurd man, the same as Sisyphus, ought to keep pushing the boulder for that lets him reach acceptance over his situation.
In a modern world, Bergman is able to posit these themes in front of us in a poetic fashion. When Kierkegaard claims that Johannes de Silentio is not a philosopher but merely a poet, it becomes clear that the poets are the ones who can more easily penetrate the human psyche in order to portray this so the rest of us can see this sublimity.
Bergman is then a poet who can not only have technical achievements of the highest caliber, but is also capable of showing the human condition in one of the most personal sides of ourselves.