The Scandinavian Art of Relinquishment

I. The Scandal in the Palace

Watching Gladiator II not long ago, I found myself arrested less by the violence than by what we are asked to feel about it. The film wants for the tragic grandeur of its predecessor, but it contains one scene that outlives the spectacle around it. The young Lucius is made to fight another prisoner to the death, not in the vast anonymity of the arena, but in the close air of the imperial palace, among courtiers and aristocrats and the household of the emperor himself. The two men struggle amid overturned furniture and broken ornament until one of them falls, and the company applauds.

What is striking is not that Romans applaud violence; violence was the warp of Roman life. What is striking is that we are expected to recoil from the applause. The death does not shock us; our cinema has long since exhausted our capacity for that. What offends is the sight of cultivated men and women taking pleasure in the degradation of another human being. We feel at once that a line has been crossed, that a person has been used as a thing.

It is worth asking why we should feel so, because the answer is less obvious than the feeling.

We have inherited it; that is the whole of the answer, and it explains nothing until it is unfolded. A Roman of taste, set down miraculously in a modern cinema, would have been puzzled by our recoil. The men are prisoners; their lives are already forfeit. Courage has been shown, skill displayed, an afternoon’s excitement provided at someone’s expense. Why should the death of an obscure captive weigh more in the moral scales than the death of a stag in the hunt? The question is not barbarous. It is merely pre-Christian, and that is a harder thing for us to imagine than barbarism.

Here I take my bearings from Tom Holland, whose Dominion argues (and the argument has been much contested, which is part of its value) that the moral intuitions we treat as universal are in truth the residue of one particular history. Holland’s most unsettling claim is that Christianity has so thoroughly conquered the Western mind that its assumptions now appear self-evident even to those who have repudiated its God (History for Atheists). That the weak possess a worth equal to the strong; that suffering lays an obligation upon the one who witnesses it; that power must justify itself before some bar higher than success; that every human being carries a dignity owing nothing to status, beauty, or use: these strike us as the plain furniture of conscience. To much of the ancient world they would have seemed strange, and in places seditious.

One ought to hear the counter-voice at once, for it makes Holland’s case sharper rather than weaker. Nietzsche saw exactly the same historical fact and called it a catastrophe. The elevation of the slave, the widow, the prisoner, the defeated: what Holland reads as revolution, Nietzsche read as ressentiment dressed in the robes of virtue, the revenge of the weak upon the strong, a “slave morality” that had unmanned the West. The datum is not in dispute between them. Only its worth is. And it is no accident, as we shall see, that Ibsen kept Nietzsche’s books to hand and noted in his own hand that “Christianity demoralizes and restrains” (Taylor & Francis). The quarrel between Holland and Nietzsche runs straight through the Scandinavian imagination; the writers I shall consider are its battlefield.

Rome admired many things: courage, discipline, magnanimity, public service, the soldier’s excellence and the citizen’s loyalty. What it did not, on the whole, admire was weakness. Christianity did not abolish the older virtues; it absorbed them, baptized them, set them to new work; but it introduced an unprecedented solicitude for those whom antiquity had been content to overlook: the slave, the widow, the orphan, the prisoner, the outcast, the poor. The moral imagination of Europe was altered not by the discovery of power, of which the ancients knew everything, but by the discovery of vulnerability.

Against this background the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth appear not merely demanding but insurrectionary, though familiarity has worn the edge from them. When Peter asks how often he must forgive his brother, he proposes what he plainly thinks a handsome limit, “till seven times?”, and the reply does not raise the limit but abolishes the counting: “Until seventy times seven.” Peter is still inside the ledger, asking where the column ends. The answer takes the ledger away. The point was never the number; the point is the ruin of arithmetic.

The same logic governs the hardest sayings, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you”, and the reason given is decisive: “For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?” The demand is not for kindness, which any decent pagan could manage, but for something past the reach of reciprocity. To mirror another’s conduct is no achievement; the revolutionary command begins precisely where mirroring stops. The Christian is asked to surrender the ledger itself. And the strangest passage of all binds the surrender to the surrenderer’s own fate: “if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: but if ye forgive not… neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

What emerges from these sayings is not only an ethic but an anthropology. A human being is not, at bottom, a bearer of status or a sum of uses; he is not reducible to the injuries he inflicts or the injuries he suffers; he remains, even in his failure, a creature of irreducible worth. Forgiveness becomes thinkable only because the offender is held to be something more than his offense; and there, in a sentence, is the whole distance between the palace that applauds and the conscience that flinches.

The ancient city rested on reciprocity. Honor demanded acknowledgement, insult its answer, injury its repayment; the equilibrium of social life was a perpetual squaring of accounts. Into this world Christianity introduced a principle grounded not in exchange but in grace, and the tension between the two has never been resolved. We live in it still.

It is at first surprising to find that some of the most searching explorations of that tension belong not to theology but to the literature and cinema of Scandinavia. To the modern eye the North signifies efficient administration, social democracy, a comfortable secularism, an enviable standard of living. Beneath these associations runs an older preoccupation. From Kierkegaard’s meditations on love and resignation, through Ibsen’s dramas of inherited deceit and Strindberg’s long passage from accusation toward grace, to the late films of Bergman and the quiet sacramental vision of Babette’s Feast, one meets again and again a single conviction: that reconciliation is purchased only by a prior act of letting go.

Not resignation in the small, defeated sense; not passivity, not indifference; but the relinquishment of a claim: the claim to vengeance, to certainty, to possession, to moral advantage, to the lifelong cultivation of a wound. For grievance offers a counterfeit infinity. It can be revisited without end, fed without end, made the source of identity without end; whole lives are built upon a remembered injury, as upon a foundation that never settles. The Scandinavian tradition I mean to trace proposes that surrendering this false infinity may be the price of admission to a true one, the road to reconciliation, whether with another, with oneself, or with God, beginning exactly where possession ends.

II. Kierkegaard, and the Renunciation of Possession

If Christianity introduced the scandalous proposition that forgiveness requires the surrender of reciprocity, it fell to Søren Kierkegaard to follow that proposition inward, into the chambers of the single self, with a psychological exactness rarely equalled. For Kierkegaard the problem of forgiveness was never separable from the problem of love, and the problem of love was never separable from the problem of possession. Much of his authorship turns on one recurring question: what must be given up before anything worth having can be received?

The question first put itself to him as a wound. No account of Kierkegaard can step around Regine Olsen and the broken engagement that became perhaps the most consequential romantic failure in the history of philosophy. It would be a mistake, though, to leave the matter at biography. The significance lies not in the particulars but in the trajectory they set in motion: out of that rupture came a sustained meditation on love, sacrifice, resignation, faith, and the peculiarly human temptation to convert a person into a possession.

He is known to us under several reputations: the philosopher of anxiety, the father of existentialism, the man of the “leap of faith”; and each is true enough to be misleading. Beneath the pseudonyms and the dialectical machinery sits a thinker preoccupied above all with attachment. What is it to love another person? More precisely: what is it to love another while leaving both their freedom and one’s own intact? The question looks simple until one holds it to the light. We desire permanence; we want assurances, guarantees, proofs, the lover’s certainty that he is loved and the parent’s that affection will outlast the years. And every such demand runs aground on the same rock: that another person is not a possession, and remains free. The wish to abolish that uncertainty is entirely understandable. It is also impossible.

In Fear and Trembling (1843) the pseudonymous Johannes de Silentio gives this insight its sharpest form in the figure of infinite resignation, among the most misread phrases in the whole vocabulary. To the modern ear “resignation” suggests defeat. Kierkegaard means very nearly its opposite. The knight of infinite resignation is the man capable of giving up what he loves most without ceasing to love it; “infinite resignation is the last stage before faith,” and whoever has not made the movement “has no faith.” Resignation is presented not as the failure of love but as its purification: the relinquishing of the demand that the beloved belong to one.

The same conviction returns, more austere, in Works of Love (1847), where Kierkegaard sets the preferential loves, eros and friendship, against the commanded love of the neighbor. The neighbor, he insists, is precisely not the beloved: not chosen for attraction or advantage, but given. Here I must be candid about the company I am keeping, because Works of Love is one of the most quarrelled-over books in the Kierkegaard literature. Its apparent demotion of romantic love to “a form of selfishness” has struck many careful readers as incoherent, for the book seems at times to disallow preferential love and at times to bless it, and a substantial scholarship (the dispute is laid out plainly in the Heythrop Journal) has tried to decide whether the tension is a contradiction or a depth (Wiley). I take the charitable reading, and I think it is also the correct one: Kierkegaard is not condemning the love of the particular person but the love that possesses the particular person, the love in which God has ceased to be, in his own phrase, “the middle term” (Piety on Kierkegaard). Love must will the good of the other, not merely secure satisfaction for itself. Read so, the two books say one thing.

Infinite resignation, then, is a discipline of freedom. It grants that the beloved can never be guaranteed, never held permanently in place, that she may change, depart, disappoint, or die, and it loves her anyway, which is the only way of loving a real person rather than an idol. The knight does not love less; he may love far more. What he gives up is the demand to possess, to underwrite the future, to convert trust into certainty. And only on the far side of that surrender does faith become possible at all.

This is why the knight of faith is so persistently misunderstood. Faith is not the refusal of reason nor a leap into the dark; it is the acceptance of a condition that reason itself discloses but cannot mend. The future is uncertain. Other persons are free and lie beyond our rightful claim; Kierkegaard warns expressly against making another into “the object of possession” rather than the neighbor one is bound to love. Love is vulnerable, and nothing abolishes these facts. The leap is taken not because the evidence vanishes but because the evidence runs out; faith begins where the ledger ends.

The bearing of all this on forgiveness is exact, and it is the hinge of my whole argument. Resentment, no less than possessiveness, is a hunger for mastery. The grievance insists on repayment; it wants to reverse the injury, to restore the lost balance, to recover what was taken. In this the resentful man is the very twin of the anxious lover. Both wage an unwinnable war against contingency; both demand of reality a guarantee it has never once supplied. To forgive is not necessarily to excuse, nor to forget, nor even to reconcile. It is, first, to relinquish the fantasy of possessing the past. The injury occurred; the loss will not be undone; the account will never come out even. And so the injured party is offered a choice he would rather not have: to go on cultivating the grievance, drawing meaning and identity from its careful maintenance, or to let go his claim upon a past that no longer exists.

Kierkegaard understood that such a relinquishment hurts because it is a kind of dying: something cherished must be surrendered, whether a grievance, a longed-for certainty, or an illusion of control. Yet the surrender is not merely a subtraction. It opens a new relation to the real, in which one stops demanding guarantees and begins, at last, accepting gifts. Long before Bergman’s exhausted protagonists, before Strindberg’s late religious dramas, before Babette ever lit her stove, Kierkegaard had diagnosed a sickness that is not Danish but modern: the compulsion to possess what can only be received, to insist on certainty where only trust is on offer, to seize where one is asked to accept. The cure, so far as there is one, begins not in acquisition but in its renunciation.

II.5. Hans Christian Andersen

It is worth pausing over Denmark before we leave it for the larger argument, because the reader may reasonably protest that, Babette’s Feast aside, the small kingdom that produced Kierkegaard has been left curiously mute. The protest is just, and the remedy lies close to hand, in the one Dane the whole world has read without noticing what he was saying. For at the very moment Kierkegaard was anatomizing resignation in the philosophical idiom, his fellow Copenhagener Hans Christian Andersen was dramatizing it in the nursery, and the two men, who disliked each other and shared a city too small to hold them both, were circling the same wound from opposite ends of the literary register.

We have sentimentalized Andersen into a maker of children’s amusements, which is precisely how a culture defangs what it cannot afford to hear. Read again, the tales are theological to the bone, and their recurring subject is the one this essay has been pursuing: what the soul must surrender, and what it may not. Andersen was a devout and tormented Christian, and the scholarship has long since established that the Biblical pattern is not an ornament upon the tales but their armature (H. C. Andersen Center, University of Southern Denmark).

The Little Match Girl is the purest instance, and the most unbearable. A child freezes to death in a doorway on New Year’s Eve while the lighted windows above her overflow with goose and candle and warmth, and the passers-by, finding the small corpse in the morning, pity it and understand nothing. The story is, at its surface, an indictment of exactly the indifference this essay opened by naming: the cultivated who feast while a human being is destroyed within earshot. But Andersen does not leave us in the doorway. In the last flaring of the matches the dead grandmother appears, “so bright and radiant, so mild,” and gathers the child into her arms, and the two rise together “in brightness and joy” to where “there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God” (American Literature). The girl relinquishes everything, including her life, having held a claim on nothing; and the story insists, with a severity that ought to disturb us more than it does, that her dying is not defeat but deliverance. It is the Nazarene’s anthropology in its starkest form: the least of these, the one whom the city overlooked, is precisely the one possessed of an irreducible worth that the warm windows cannot see. Grace is not earned at that table. It is given to the one who had nothing to bargain with.

The Little Mermaid is the harder and, for our purposes, the more instructive case, because it does not do the same thing, and the difference is the whole lesson. Here is a creature who wants a soul and sets out to secure one, by a bargain with the witch, by the sacrifice of her voice, by a contract whose terms are spelled out like a deed: love won, or death by dawn. This is salvation pursued as acquisition, the very error Kierkegaard would name, the attempt to possess what can only be received. And the bargain fails, as every such bargain in this tradition fails; the prince marries another, and the knife her sisters bring her, the instrument by which she might purchase her old life back with his heart’s blood, is the precise emblem of the resentful claim, the demand that another be destroyed to restore one’s own balance. Her greatness is that she cannot do it. She throws the knife into the sea and herself after it, relinquishing the claim at the last possible instant, and only then, having surrendered both the contract and the vengeance, is she granted what the contract could never have delivered. The soul she tried to buy and the soul she is finally given are not the same soul. One can hear the editors who softened the ending fretting that the moral was too austere, and grafting on the three hundred years of good works that would let the child-reader feel the bargain honoured after all (Reactor). But the deeper tale, the one Andersen wrote before the editors reached it, says something his century did not want to hear and ours has forgotten: that the soul is not a wage, that it cannot be secured by any sacrifice however total, and that it arrives, if it arrives at all, only to the hand that has finally stopped grasping.

Set side by side, the two tales mark the poles between which the whole of this essay moves. The match girl possesses nothing and receives everything. The mermaid tries to possess everything and receives it only when she lets it go. Between them lies the entire art of relinquishment, already complete in the Danish nursery a generation before Bergman was born, and waiting, as it always waits, to be mistaken for a story about the sea.

III. Ibsen, and the Question of How Much Truth We Can Bear

If Kierkegaard is the philosopher of relinquishment, Henrik Ibsen is the dramatist of disclosure. His plays return obsessively to the spectacle of comfortable illusion colliding with unwelcome fact: the respectable household, the prosperous town, the successful marriage subjected to a slow, merciless exposure as hidden debts surface and old sins refuse to stay buried. Yet Ibsen’s relation to truth is subtler than his reputation as the great unmasker suggests. His finest plays keep asking a harder question than “what is being concealed?” They ask how much truth a human being can actually endure.

In Ghosts, Captain Alving is dead before the curtain rises and omnipresent throughout. His dissipations, and above all the elaborate fiction built to hide them, go on governing the living; Mrs Alving has spent her widowhood preserving appearances, and the reward of her labor is not peace but inheritance: the lie descending intact to the next generation and surfacing at last in Oswald’s ruin. The dead rule because the truth was never spoken. A Doll’s House works the same seam, though its later career as a political emblem has obscured the fact that its first concern is epistemological rather than ideological: Nora and Torvald inhabit a marriage founded on mutual misreading, and the famous slammed door is not only a declaration of independence but a verdict: that reconciliation without truth is no reconciliation at all. Before there can be forgiveness, there must be reality to forgive.

So far Ibsen seems to teach that truth liberates. His greatest and most disquieting play exists to complicate that lesson. The Wild Duck stands at the center of his achievement precisely because it turns on the very principle the other plays appear to serve. The Ekdal household (Hjalmar, the self-dramatizing photographer; Gina, his practical wife; their daughter Hedvig; and old Ekdal, the disgraced officer who hunts imaginary game in the attic) survives on a tissue of consoling fictions. The attic itself, that strange indoor forest of rabbits and pigeons and the wounded duck of the title, is one of the great symbolic spaces of modern drama: a refuge where dreams outlive defeat.

Into it walks Gregers Werle, son of the merchant whose past dealings helped ruin the Ekdals, persuaded that he has a sacred duty to expose every falsehood under what he grandly calls “the claim of the ideal.” Here I must register a quarrel with the standard reading, because the standard reading has had to be revised, and the revision matters to my argument. It was long assumed that Gregers, for all his fanaticism, speaks for truth, and that Dr Relling, the cynic who insists that “the life-lie” is what keeps the average man upright, speaks for mere comfortable evasion. Recent criticism has dismantled that tidy opposition. As one Ibsen scholar has shown, the play does not endorse the values of freedom and authenticity that Gregers proclaims; it exposes them, and Gregers’s idealism is “unequivocally condemned as naive and destructive by the text in which he is incorporated” (Taylor & Francis). His truth-telling is not the disinterested service of reality but the discharge of a sick conscience inherited from a poisonous father. This is the deeper Ibsen: the man who had read his Nietzsche and noted that “Christianity demoralizes,” and who could therefore see that a certain kind of “honesty” is only cruelty that has learned to admire itself.

What gives the play its terrible authority is Ibsen’s refusal to caricature anyone. Gregers is sincere to the point of derangement; Hjalmar is vain and self-pitying and also recognisably human in his hunger for dignity; Hedvig, perhaps the most heartbreaking child in the nineteenth-century theater, loves her father without reserve. When Gregers proposes that the girl prove her love by sacrificing the wild duck, the symbolic center of her imaginative world, the machinery he has set in motion runs past anyone’s power to stop it, and a child dies in the service of an abstraction. The liberator has destroyed what he came to free.

One thinks of Eliot’s line in Burnt Norton, that “human kind cannot bear very much reality”, too often read as mere pessimism when it is in fact an anthropological observation of the first importance. We do not live by fact alone. Memory, hope, affection, imagination, and a measure of benign illusion are part of the architecture that keeps a life habitable; to strip away every mediation between the self and the real is not necessarily to liberate, and may only be to drive to despair. Ibsen, in The Wild Duck, appears to argue with himself: where Ghosts and A Doll’s House indict the illusion, this play indicts the truth that has been hardened into an absolute. Neither falsehood nor disclosure will serve as a universal medicine.

The same difficulty recurs, in a more heroic key, in An Enemy of the People. Dr Stockmann discovers that the baths on which his town’s prosperity depends are poisoned, and the town, press and council and commerce and ordinary citizenry alike, closes ranks against the man who says so. Stockmann’s greatness is that he will not recant; he gives up income, standing, and popularity, but he will not give up the real. He is a secular prophet, and like a prophet his vindication is moral and not social: the truth is established and the community is not healed, the conflict left exactly where it stood. Taken together the plays disclose something unexpected. Ibsen is neither the partisan of truth nor the apologist for illusion. He is the dramatist of a civilization trying to work out what truth is for. Without it, reconciliation rots into sentimentality and self-deception; with it alone, the wounds it opens will not close. Gregers has truth and destroys a family; Stockmann has truth and loses a town; Mrs Alving buries the truth and destroys her son; Nora finds it and walks out of her marriage. The lesson is not that truth may be dispensed with, for it is indispensable, but that it is not sufficient. And so Ibsen hands on to those who came after him a question his own theater cannot answer: what follows revelation? What, if anything, turns truth into reconciliation? I will not pretend that Ibsen sits as comfortably under my thesis as the others do, for his abiding subject is the cost of truth rather than the surrender of a claim, and the honest reader will feel the seam where I have enlisted him. But the strain is itself instructive, for The Wild Duck exposes the limit case of truth as virtue: the point at which the cult of disclosure, pursued without mercy, ceases to liberate and begins to kill, so that a child dies in the service of an abstraction and the liberator is left holding the corpse of the thing he came to free. It is at exactly that limit that relinquishment becomes legible, visible by its absence, as the one thing Gregers could not perform and the one thing that might have saved Hedvig; and that is why Ibsen, the dramatist who clears the ground of illusion and then stands helpless at the edge of the reconciliation he cannot supply, belongs in this argument not despite the strain but because of it.

IV. Strindberg and the Renunciation of Vindication

If Ibsen’s subject was truth and illusion, Strindberg’s was suffering and love; and no dramatist of the modern age laid open the wounds of the self with more ferocity, or pressed harder on the question of why creatures who so crave intimacy should so reliably convert it into war. To read the middle plays is to watch a man conduct an endless trial against existence, summoning to the bar women, institutions, rivals, conventions, and at last his own heart.

The atmosphere is unmistakable. Love seldom appears as communion; far more often as a contest of wills, in which affection tangles with pride, desire with resentment, attraction with the wish to humiliate. The characters want not merely to be loved but to prevail. In The Father, the struggle between the Captain and Laura is ostensibly about their daughter’s upbringing and is really about who holds the right to define the reality on which a life is built; Laura works upon her husband’s certainty of his own paternity until she has unseated his confidence in reason itself, and the catastrophe is less psychological than metaphysical: a man losing not his authority only but his place in the world. Miss Julie takes the same wound and makes it erotic: two people drawn together by fascination and ambition and mutual contempt, each demanding of the other what the other cannot give, every apparent conquest concealing a deeper defeat. Desire itself is shown to be corrupted by the longing to dominate; power does not redeem love, it poisons it. By the time of The Dance of Death the struggle has turned geological. Edgar and Alice inhabit a marriage so silted with grievance that resentment has stopped being an emotion and become a climate; they cannot stay together and cannot part, and their island fortress is the perfect emblem of a self imprisoned by the very claims it will not surrender.

Set beside Kierkegaard, the Strindberg of these years is almost the photographic negative. Where Kierkegaard anatomizes the relinquishment of possession, Strindberg stages possession carried to its last consequence: characters clutching at certainty, pride, grievance, vindication, until the clutching becomes their bondage. They are prisoners of what they cannot let go.

Then something happened. The upheaval the biographers call the Inferno crisis (the period of breakdown, occultism, and conversion that Strindberg recorded in the novel Inferno) altered not only his beliefs but his understanding of suffering itself. Here again I am leaning on the scholarship, and it is worth naming: Martin Lamm’s great study, which established the standard account of the crisis as the hinge of the whole career, and the reading of the late “chamber plays” as its fruit. One need not follow Strindberg into the stranger reaches of his Swedenborgianism, the immersion in Swedenborg’s writings that accompanied his re-evaluation of Catholicism, the conviction that he was Job, “the upright and irreproachable,” scourged by unseen powers (Heavy Feather Review), to recognize the change of temperature in the later work. The wish to accuse gives way, tentatively, to the wish to understand; the longing to win, to the longing for peace.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Easter. Suffering does not leave the stage, for the household is still crushed by debt and public disgrace following the father’s imprisonment, the creditors real, the poverty real, the shame real; but suffering has changed its office. It is no longer merely punishment; it has become the medium of transformation. The structure is almost that of late Shakespeare: a gathering of separate wounds slowly revealed as movements in a single passage toward reconciliation, estrangements softening and expectations quietly set down. The process is not magical. It is moral. The critic Stephen Mitchell traced exactly this path “from Inferno to the chamber plays,” and Easter is its purest specimen (eNotes).

The relationship of Elis and Eleonora carries the meaning. Elis is the younger Strindberg under another name: he longs for certainty, demands reassurance, will not entrust himself to the future until the future has been secured, mistaking, as anxious lovers do, control for love and guarantee for faith. Eleonora declines to play. She does not torment him and does not reject him; she loves him, and her love requires only that he surrender the demand that love become certainty. It is the most Kierkegaardian moment in all of Strindberg: Elis discovers that trust begins exactly where guarantee ends, that the obstacle to intimacy was never the uncertainty but his refusal to accept it. Around them the same movement spreads: the family ceasing to demand vindication for old injuries, the father’s disgrace becoming an occasion for forgiveness rather than perpetual sentence, humiliation passing into humility. No single revelation resolves anything; the characters are changed by relinquishing the need to prevail.

This is the great turn of Strindberg’s career. The younger man sought vindication: his characters wished to expose, defeat, accuse, or merely outlast one another, and even their suffering hid a demand for victory. The older man came to suspect that some injuries are not healed by triumph, that some grievances survive every verdict, and that the question worth asking is not who wins but whether reconciliation remains possible at all. Easter is animated by the renunciation of the wish to prevail; and only on its far side does grace become conceivable. Not grace as a supernatural machinery lowered into the plot, but grace as a transformed relation to the real, in which the suffering and the loss and the humiliation all remain, and none of them is permitted the last word. If The Wild Duck shows that truth alone cannot save, Easter proposes what may come after truth: not illusion, but mercy; not vindication, but reconciliation. The playwright who once imagined marriage as siege warfare had begun, near the end, to imagine forgiveness.

V. Bergman, and the Long Education of Mercy

If Kierkegaard bequeathed the Northern imagination its problem of faith, Ibsen its problem of truth, and Strindberg its problem of suffering, Ingmar Bergman inherited all three at once. Few artists have given so much of a working life to guilt, judgment, estrangement, and the bare possibility of reconciliation. What distinguishes him within this tradition is that his answer changes: the younger Bergman is the artist of accusation, the older Bergman the artist of mercy, and the long passage between is the most instructive thing about him.

The change is neither sudden nor clean; much of the career reads as a war between the two impulses. The films return continually to wounded families and failed marriages, to people who seek intimacy and meet misunderstanding, who seek certainty and meet ambiguity, who seek forgiveness and meet silence; and beneath these recurrences lies a deeper question: how long can a soul survive inside a condition of judgment? Bergman is often called a sceptic, which is not quite false and misses the essential thing. Scepticism implies detachment, and Bergman was never detached. The God who haunts the films is absent not because he has been forgotten but because he is wanted; the anguish is that of longing, not of indifference, and what one hears throughout the great middle films is not the serenity of unbelief but the torment of unanswered prayer.

Winter Light is the bleakest statement of it. Pastor Tomas Ericsson goes on performing the offices of a faith whose inward conviction has drained away; when the frightened Jonas Persson comes to him asking, with terrible simplicity, why one should go on living, the shepherd proves as lost as the sheep. But Bergman’s deepest judgment on Tomas is not theological; it is moral, and it does not descend from heaven. It comes from Märta, the schoolteacher who loves him, whose letter tells him “you have never listened to me,” and who names him “cruelly indifferent.” The reproach cuts deeper than any argument about God’s existence, because it exposes a failure not of doctrine but of charity: Tomas has been so consumed by the silence of heaven that he has stopped hearing the voices of the living. His suffering has folded inward upon itself until the search for God is indistinguishable from an incapacity to love. Here is the theme that will increasingly possess Bergman: that the gravest human danger is not doubt but self-enclosure, the spiritual narcissism of a self so absorbed in its own wounds that it can no longer see another person at all, locked in perpetual litigation against reality.

Wild Strawberries sounds the same note more gently. Professor Isak Borg, driving north to receive an honorary degree, discovers that the real journey is moral: his dreams and memories arraign him for a lifetime of reserve, of affections neglected through pride, and the famous sequences of stopped clocks and faceless examiners evoke less the fear of death than the persistence of judgment. The coldness that shaped the father, we learn, is already shaping the son, who confesses that he wishes only to die: Captain Alving’s sins, transmitted down the generations, the dead ruling the living once again. Yet here Bergman diverges from Ibsen at the decisive point: the film does not end in exposure but moves toward understanding. The young Sara tells Borg, “there is no forgiveness,” and then, after a pause, “there is no accusation either.” The remark looks like paradox until one sees the world Bergman is leaving behind. Forgiveness and accusation alike belong to a juridical imagination; both presuppose a ledger, both assume that a life is a column of debts to be balanced. The reconciliation Bergman is reaching toward asks something more radical: the relinquishment of accounting itself. The goal is no longer vindication, as it was no longer vindication in Easter. The goal is peace.

The movement reaches its maturity in Fanny and Alexander and in The Best Intentions, late works informed by a vantage the young director could not have occupied. Neither softens reality. What changes is the moral horizon within which suffering is understood. In Fanny and Alexander the Bishop Vergerus enters as severity untempered by mercy, his authority resting on discipline and fear; when Alexander says “I hate you,” and when Emilie confesses that she hates him “so violently,” Bergman never asks us to pretend the hatred unwarranted; the bishop is genuinely destructive, the wound genuine. The film’s wisdom lies elsewhere. The question is not whether hatred can be justified but whether hatred can be made a home. The Ekdahl family survives because it finally refuses to organize its future around its injuries; the bishop is defeated, but more than that he ceases to occupy the center of their imaginative life, and the theater and the children and the conversation and the celebration return. Helena Ekdahl’s “everything can happen, everything is possible and probable” stands almost as a manifesto for the late imagination: the future remains open, and the wound, real as it is, need not be made sovereign.

The Best Intentions says the same thing in a more intimate register. Bergman’s screenplay, directed by Bille August, portrays his own parents’ marriage with a candor bordering on cruelty: Henrik and Anna wound each other again and again, each able to strike precisely because each knows where the other is soft. Yet the writer near the end of his life approaches them with a sympathy the young artist could not have afforded; he no longer assigns blame, he seeks to understand, and he refuses to let the quarrels exhaust the meaning of the marriage. Beneath the accusations there persists an attachment neither party fully understands and neither can extinguish. Near the close, after years of it, Henrik asks his wife with almost childlike uncertainty, “So, you don’t want us to go on?” and Anna answers, “You know I do. I want nothing else. That is all I want.” What has been relinquished there is not anger merely but the wish for vindication. Neither is justified; neither wins; neither is proved wholly right; and reconciliation becomes possible only because the claims of love at last outweigh the claims of pride. The older Bergman denies neither the suffering nor the wrong, and declines the consolations of sentiment. What he discovers is harder and simpler than either: that a life cannot be sustained on accusation, and that the future belongs not to those who prevail but to those who remain capable of mercy.

V.5. The Case Against

It would be too easy to let the argument run downhill from here to the feast, and a reader entitled to his suspicion will already have begun to mount the objection. So let me make it for him, as strongly as I can, because a thesis that has not survived its best adversary has not been earned.

The objection is that I have rigged the jury. The tradition I have called the Scandinavian art of relinquishment is, on this view, an artefact of selection: I have chosen the works in which the ledger is at last closed and passed over the far larger body of Northern art in which it never closes at all, in which there is no grace, no feast, no daughter of the air, only the cold and the sea-foam and the silence. And the North supplies this counter-canon in abundance. Consider Knut Hamsun, the greatest Scandinavian novelist of the age and its most uncomfortable conscience, whose Lieutenant Glahn in Pan and whose nameless starveling in Hunger are studies in a self that will relinquish nothing, that converts even its own degradation into a perverse assertion of will. Glahn does not forgive, does not accept, does not lay down his claim; he shoots himself in the leg for no reason and walks toward a pointless death with a smile that Hamsun insists is “beautiful.” What governs him, as one critic has put it exactly, “is in fact resentment” raised to a principle of existence (Nordlit, University of Tromsø). Here is the Nietzschean North, and it is no less authentically Scandinavian than Babette’s kitchen. Hamsun gave the century its purest portrait of the unrelinquishing soul, and the century answered by giving him the Nobel Prize.

Nor need one leave Strindberg to find the rebuttal, for the rebuttal is already inside him, and I have perhaps been too quick to let Easter speak for the whole man. The Dance of Death was written in 1900, years after the Inferno crisis that was supposed to have turned him toward grace, and it contains not a grain of it. Edgar and Alice torment each other on their island to no purpose and no end; the play, as the criticism notes, “ends right where it started,” with the marriage intact precisely because nothing in it has been surrendered or healed (Wikipedia, The Dance of Death). If Easter is the truth of the late Strindberg, what is The Dance of Death, written in the same period by the same converted hand? The honest answer is that both are true of him, and that I have promoted the consoling one to the rank of his maturity while demoting the desolating one to a relic of his past. The developmental reading, which lets each of my artists “arrive” at relinquishment, may be less a discovery about them than a shape I have imposed upon them.

And the cinema closes the trap. Against Babette’s Feast one need only set Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, the supreme achievement of Danish film and the exact photographic negative of everything I have claimed. There the religious community is not the site of an unexpected grace but the engine of persecution; the old woman burns, the young wife is destroyed, and the God invoked at every turn is silent or worse. Dreyer, whose whole body of work is steeped in Christian feeling, made the case that the Christian inheritance produces not the abolition of the ledger but its cruelest enforcement, the tribunal that cannot stop counting. If grace is Scandinavian, so is the auto-da-fé.

I concede the force of all this, and I will not pretend the concession is small. The pattern I am tracing is not a law of the Northern soul; it is a thread, and the cloth contains other threads, darker and at least as strong. What I deny is that the counter-canon dissolves the pattern. It does the opposite. Hamsun’s Glahn is legible as a tragedy only against the possibility of the relinquishment he refuses; his resentment is not an alternative to the Christian anthropology but its photographic negative, intelligible only by the light of what it negates, exactly as Nietzsche’s whole assault on Christian morality remains, in its fury, a Christian heresy. Dreyer’s tribunal is terrible to us, as the applause in the palace was terrible to us, for a reason the opening of this essay has already supplied: we judge the persecuting community by a standard the community itself betrays, the standard of the very Galilean in whose name it lights the fire. And the late Strindberg who could still write The Dance of Death is not evidence against the turn toward grace but the measure of how hard that turn was, how little it resembled a conversion’s tidy arithmetic, how completely it had to be wrung from a man who never stopped being capable of the abyss. The thread is real. I claim no more for it than that. But a thread that runs through resistance, and is visible even in the works built to deny it, is a stronger thread than one that runs only through its friends.

VI. Grace as Gift, Grace as Endurance

By the last decades of the twentieth century the Northern imagination had traveled a long way from the battlefields of Ibsen and Strindberg, though the great questions were unchanged: men still suffered, still wounded one another, still bequeathed their pride and resentment to their children. What had shifted was the emphasis. The question was no longer how to expose the illusion, nor how to endure the suffering, nor even how to reconcile oneself to disappointment, but what remains possible once all of these have been acknowledged. Two of the finest Scandinavian films of the period give an answer that is almost embarrassing in its simplicity. What remains is gift; and where gift is impossible, what remains is endurance.

Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, drawn from Karen Blixen’s tale, holds a singular place not only in Scandinavian cinema but in the moral imagination of the modern West, and its profundity is half-hidden by its restraint. A small, austere religious community on the Jutland coast becomes the unlikely beneficiary of an extraordinary generosity: Babette, the exiled French cook who has unexpectedly come into a fortune, spends every franc of it on a single feast for people who can give her nothing in return. Nothing is argued; no doctrine is preached; and yet by the end old grievances have loosened, ancient rivalries have lost their grip, and long-tended injuries have stopped seeming quite so important. The change comes not through persuasion but through sheer abundance; and here the tradition draws nearest to the Christian conception of grace, for the feast is not earned, not a wage for virtue, not apportioned by merit. It simply arrives. The recipients have done nothing to deserve it and several scarcely understand it, and they are changed all the same.

It is worth saying that the criticism has long read the film this way, and rightly; Blixen, who held herself at an ironic distance from Christian faith, nonetheless built the tale on the architecture of the Mass, and a sizeable body of sacramental reading has grown up around it (University of South Carolina). The point on which the whole film turns is given to General Loewenhielm, the one guest who has gone out into the great world and tasted its glory and its loss, who rises and says: “Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.” The line is from the Psalms, and in the General’s mouth it is the summary of everything. “Grace,” he tells the table, “makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty” (Modern Reformation). The tensions that occupied Kierkegaard and Ibsen and Strindberg and Bergman do not so much resolve as dissolve. Truth remains and suffering remains and human frailty remains, and none of them is given the last word, because something larger has come into the room. The feast does not abolish the ledger by denying that the debts exist. It renders the ledger irrelevant by an act of pure gift. One leaves the film persuaded that human beings are redeemed less often by argument than by undeserved kindness.

Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror reaches the same horizon from the opposite pole. If Babette’s Feast is a film of abundance, Pelle is a film of scarcity; if Axel explores the gift, August explores endurance. The world Pelle and his father inhabit is harsh and frequently unjust, marked by poverty, humiliation, exploitation, and loneliness, with none of the warmth of the Ekdahl house and nothing of the sacramental splendor of Babette’s table, and yet it possesses a dignity no less profound. The film neither sentimentalizes suffering nor grants it the dignity of the last word. Its people are injured by life but not finally defined by the injury; again and again one meets a man who could justify his resentment and who goes on nevertheless. Pelle’s triumph, such as it is, does not consist in defeating his enemies or escaping injustice; it consists in keeping hope alive. Human dignity survives not because the suffering is absent but because the suffering does not exhaust the meaning of the person who bears it.

These two films are best read as a single diptych. One shows grace as gift descending unbidden into a community sealed by old wounds; the other shows grace as endurance, dignity persisting amid deprivation. Together they propose that we are reconciled to existence neither by mastering it nor by denying it, but by the difficult acceptance of the terms on which human life is actually lived.

It is tempting to file all this under “the Scandinavian temperament” and have done with it. The truer account reaches further back. The thread that runs through these works runs past Copenhagen and Oslo and Stockholm and the Jutland coast, past the nineteenth century and past modernity, to the unsettling instruction of a Galilean who told his followers to forgive seventy times seven, to love those who could repay them with nothing, and to lay down the endless arithmetic of resentment. The Northern imagination never stopped wrestling with that inheritance, questioning it, resisting it, secularizing it, psychologizing it, at times rebelling against it outright. And the wager of these pages has been a simple one: that across two centuries and a handful of incompatible temperaments (Andersen’s child who possesses nothing and receives everything, Kierkegaard’s renounced possession, Ibsen’s hard-won and dangerous truth, Strindberg’s surrendered vindication, Bergman’s relinquished judgment) the same intuition keeps surfacing even in its most secular dress, and surfaces, as we have seen, even in the works built to deny it. That the deepest human flourishing begins where the hunger for mastery ends. That grievance is a counterfeit infinity, and that a man must put down the false one before his hands are open to receive the true. That peace, in the end, becomes possible only when the self at last lets go its claim to the final word. “Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.”

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Christopher S. Carson,  J.D., M.A., is a practicing attorney of 34 years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and holds a masters degree in International Security Studies from Georgetown. Formerly with the American Enterprise Institute, his essays on sacred music, Thomistic aesthetics, and cultural criticism have also appeared in The Hedgehog Review, National Review, among others, along with two essays now accepted for publication in the Athenaeum Review.

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