Note: This post contains spoilers.
It turns out, unsurprisingly, that I'm not the only one puzzled by the idea of nonreligious spirituality. Dr. Neal Sumerlin, an old friend from my small-town youth in Arkansas and now a retired professor of chemistry at the University of Lynchburg in Virginia, recently posed this question on his Facebook page: "If you describe yourself as more spiritual than religious, what does that mean to you? I'm sincerely interested to hear sincere answers. I may engage with you in the comments, but I won't condemn or judge."[2] The result was more than one hundred responses, and I followed the thread with keen interest, even throwing in a few remarks of my own toward the end.
The comments ranged from traditional affirmations of Christian faith to explanations linking spirituality with love, nature, truth, and ethical conduct. A number of respondents expressed belief in God or a higher power but varying degrees of skepticism about dogma and organized religion. Neal's own lengthy reply to the plethora of comments he invited was especially compelling to me.
In this post, Neal recounts his upbringing in the Southern Baptist Church as the son of a professor at an SB college (my own undergraduate alma mater, in fact). Though his parents weren't fundamentalists in a region where that is still more or less the norm, he received a thorough grounding in scriptural teachings and was especially formed by the ethical principles contained therein. He switched denominations (to Methodism) when he got married, and over time—there was no "blinding flash of light" moment, he says—his outlook became much more secular. Yet he remained a regular churchgoer, partly because he liked the people and the pastors, partly because he liked the Methodists' social justice traditions, partly because he liked teaching subjects such as church history and the beliefs of other religions in Sunday school, and partly because the church's support of local nonprofits gave him a way of doing good in the community. But he was done with theology and dogma.
"So what is my philosophical position?" he writes. "I am neither spiritual nor religious. I hope I am ethical. I am too deeply steeped in Biblical traditions to avoid pulling up a Bible verse from memory to explain an idea or to illustrate a point, but the ideas and positions are ethical ones, not theological ones. Theology frankly makes little sense to me. I am a strict materialist, in that I believe the reality accessed through our senses, and through instruments that enhance our senses, is all the reality there is. I believe that after I die, my consciousness will cease to exist, and from my standpoint will be as it was in 1948, before I existed. The difference is that there will be people who will remember me, will presumably miss me, who I hope will think the world has been made a little better by my having been in it."
That pretty much sums up my own position. Neal's scientific training, he says, undoubtedly played a role in his intellectual evolution, though he adds that his "neurochemical wiring"—the very thing that attracted him to science in the first place—"just reinforced and gave structure to the way my thinking runs." While the conclusions I've come to align closely with Neal's, I arrived at them via a different route, which I'll describe in a moment.
But, first, to attend to a question you might be asking: what, apart from that first-paragraph mention of Willem Dafoe and Scorsese's Last Temptation, does any of this have to do with movies? Well, as fate would have it, around the time Neal initiated his Facebook discussion, I received from Netflix the DVD of Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (The Word).[3] An acknowledged giant of world cinema, Dreyer (1889–-1968) is one of those filmmakers whose work, I'm embarrassed to admit, I've come to only recently. Some consider Ordet (1956) to be his masterpiece—or at least one of them, along with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Day of Wrath (1943), and Gertrud (1964). And, as it just so happens, Ordet is deeply concerned with many of the religious/spiritual issues addressed in Neal's FB discussion. Thus, watching it enhanced my reading of that discussion, which in turn enhanced my appreciation of the film. Most important, this experience of mutual reinforcement led me to revisit my own, ahem, "spiritual" journey.
I don't possess Neal's hardwired penchant for science; my interests have always tended toward the humanities, especially literature and film. And so my questioning of religion has perhaps been more intuitive than his. Raised in a home of devout Methodists, I was struck at an early age by how splintered Protestantism was. So many denominations, so many variations on Christian belief, some of them claiming, in fact, that you couldn't get to heaven unless you believed exactly what they believed. And then there were the Catholics (not many where I lived), whose beliefs, for reasons I didn't understand at the time, were anathema to many of our neighbors. (I can't say that my parents' attitudes toward Catholicism were unprejudiced, but at least that didn't stop them from voting for JFK.) Eventually (sometime midway through grade school, I think), having become aware of Judaism, Islam, and the various Eastern religions, troubling thoughts began occurring to me: Don't the adherents of those faiths hold to their beliefs just as fervently as Christians do to theirs? So why are they wrong and Christians right? Isn't one's religion—or lack thereof—mostly just an accident of birth and geography?
Still, I retained many of my childhood beliefs—what I'd been taught in church and Sunday school—through high school and college. However, doubts kept gnawing at me. At least one biology course along the way exposed for me once and for all the absurdity of fundamentalist attacks on Darwin's theory of natural selection; and though I never studied anthropology, I had noticed that a lot of the stories in the Old and New Testaments seemed no less fantastic than the myths from other cultures I'd read about. The "liberal" takes on scripture and faith that I clung to, no matter how well argued, increasingly seemed pallid to me. And so it went. By the time I entered graduate school in faraway New York City, I was a nonbeliever who had shed even the vaguest notions of "spirituality." Yet religion as a subject for study retained a certain fascination for me, and I can't deny the role of my Christian upbringing in the formation of my principles and character, such as they are. And that's why Ordet spoke to me in a special way, even as it has perplexed me to this moment.
II
The film is based on a four-act play by Kaj Munk, a Danish Lutheran pastor who preached against the occupying Nazis during World War II and was shot in the head for doing so, his body tossed into a ditch. First performed on stage in 1932 (with Dreyer in attendance on opening night), Munk's Ordet initially reached the screen in a 1943 Swedish production directed by Gustaf Molander, who would go on to film some of Ingmar Bergman's early screenplays. Dreyer's version, however, is the one that has most endured.[4] While I haven't seen the Molander film, I have read Munk's play.[5]Ordet dramatizes a set of disparate views on religion and spirituality not unlike a number of those expressed in Neal's Facebook discussion and not unlike those that informed my upbringing. Set in a remote part of Denmark in 1925, it focuses on a prosperous farm family, the Borgens, whose patriarch, Morten, subscribes to a fairly liberal version of Lutheranism. His three sons are all caught up in assorted issues involving faith: Mikkel, the oldest, is a nonbeliever, much to the chagrin of his father; the middle son, Johannes, is a former divinity student who has gone mad and now, fancying himself to be Jesus Christ, rails (in strange, high-pitched intonations) against the hypocrisy and "lack of faith" of those around him (fig. 1); and the youngest, Anders, is in love with Anne, the daughter of the village tailor, Peter Petersen, who leads a fundamentalist sect opposed to that of Morten Borgen—a romantic subplot owing more than a bit to Romeo and Juliet.
The story's linchpin is Mikkel's wife, Inger, a warm and loving woman who is pregnant with her third child.[6] Her husband's unbelief concerns her, but unlike her father-in-law, she doesn't despair over it. In an early scene, she tells Mikkel that his "heart [and] goodness," which for her count even more than faith, will ultimately bring him to God. A little later, when Morten worries about the efficacy of his prayers for the atheistic Mikkel and the insane Johannes, she urges him to keep praying (fig. 2). Those prayers, we infer, include at least one for Inger—specifically that her unborn child will be a boy. Morten's other grandchildren are girls, and for the aging patriarch, a male heir is key to the future of the farm.
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| Fig. 1: Believing himself to be Jesus, the mad Johannes (Preben Lerdoff Rye) denounces faithless hypocrites from the grassy dunes near the Borgen farmhouse. |
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| Fig. 2: Inger (Bergitte Federspiel) consoles her father-in-law, old Morten Borgen (Henrik Malberg). |
That conversation, once underway, quickly devolves into a religious squabble. Morten and Peter's bickering is soon interrupted by an urgent telephone call from Mikkel: Inger has gone into labor, apparently with life-threatening complications. Still bristling from their argument, Peter self-righteously suggests to Morten that his daughter-in-law's death might be just the "test" he needs to learn the error of his ways. Understandably furious at Peter and desperately anxious about Inger's condition, Morten rushes home with Anders.
What underlies the schism between the two families? In Morten's mind, as he tells Peter, their differences are these: "You think Christianity is sullenness and self-torment. I think Christianity is the fullness of life. My faith is for all day long and joy in life. Yours is the longing for death." And, to be sure, Peter's faith does put the promise of heavenly reward above any happiness to be found on earth. As he says early in the film, "My home is elsewhere." But during the argument he does get in one good dig with which the audience is bound to agree: for someone who professes to believe in a "bright and happy" Christianity, Peter observes, Morten seems to be awfully miserable.
Intertwined with the families' religious differences are class tensions. Morten looks down on the humble tailor—his taking offense at Peter's rejecting his son makes that clear—while the worst insult Peter can think of to hurl at Morten is "you swine of a landowner." It's no accident that the poorer family would identify with a sect that emphasizes salvation and the afterlife, while the well-to-do Borgen clan would claim a faith more focused on the here and now.[7]
Neither science nor prayers prevail, however. During Inger's ordeal and subsequent supposed recovery, Johannes has drifted, ghostlike, in and out of the scene predicting the worst, and his prophecy comes true. After the doctor leaves, with the headlights of his departing car suggesting to Johannes the sweep of death's scythe, Mikkel emerges from the birth room to announce that Inger has died. At the urging of little Maren, Mikkel and Inger's older daughter, Johannes attempts to resurrect his sister-in-law. He faints during the effort and shortly thereafter steals away from the farm. Despite a search, no one can find him.
Inger's death effects a reconciliation between the Borgens and the Petersens. Realizing that he had failed to "turn the other cheek" in his argument with Morten, Peter shows up at the funeral with his family, begging for forgiveness and announcing that he will allow Anders and Anne to marry so that "Inger's place shall not remain empty." Meanwhile, Mikkel sobs uncontrollably at his wife's open casket, finding no solace in assurances that her soul now lives in heaven (fig. 3). "Her body is here," he says. "I loved her body also."
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| Fig. 3: Morten and Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen) at Inger's casket. |
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| Fig. 4: Johannes, with Maren (Anne Elisabeth) at his side, attempts Inger's resurrection for a second time. |
And—astonishingly, miraculously—she does arise. Embracing his resurrected wife as tears stream down his cheeks, Mikkel informs her that their child is now in heaven and that he has accepted her faith. "Now life begins for us," he says. She repeats, "Life . . . life." And so the movie ends.
III
When I saw Ordet for the first time (I've watched it twice since), my jaw dropped at the miraculous ending. As I sensed during the movie's final moments what was coming, I said to myself, Oh no, please don't go there. But the film did—to my great annoyance. Up until this point, I was quite captivated by it, having been primed for engaging with its religious/spiritual issues by Neal Sumerlin's Facebook thread and the self-reflection that discussion had prompted. Despite its being set in Denmark in the 1920s, there was plenty in it I recognized. I could easily relate to the sectarian disputes the movie depicts, particularly its well-etched contrasts between liberal and fundamentalist approaches to Christianity, those positions I had wrestled with for a good portion of my youth. The well-meaning but sanctimonious certainty of Peter Petersen was similar to that of many people I had known growing up, while even closer to home, in terms of my own religious upbringing, were the views of Morten Borgen, which were less severe than Peter's but of a sort that now feels equally remote to me.Naturally, the characters I most closely identified with intellectually (at least on first viewing) were the religious skeptics, Mikkel and the doctor. While the reason for the doctor's skepticism is clear enough—his scientific background—the film doesn't specify exactly how and why Mikkel came to reject his family's faith. There is a suggestion that he's reacting in part to his father's somewhat overbearing ways in matters religious and otherwise, and that this rebellious tendency has been hardened by his brother's descent into insanity and fanaticism. And though this is only projection, I had no trouble imagining a backstory for Mikkel in which his pathway to unbelief was much like my own halting, intuitive journey.
But the character in Ordet I most admired was Inger. I still do. She's the very model of Christian virtue, which she doesn't flaunt or overthink in any way. She simply lives it, both in her daily domestic routines and, most especially, in her relationships with other members of the household. Whether consoling her melancholy father-in-law, reassuring her husband of his innate good-heartedness, expressing sympathy for Johannes (who, she muses, "may be nearer to God than we are"), or encouraging Anders in his romance with Anne Petersen, she is the glue that holds the family together—much more so, certainly, than the despondent patriarch, Morten.
Inger reminds me, in fact, of some of the participants in Neal's Facebook discussion, specifically those who expressed belief in God but were less enamored of denominational doctrine, who indicated that love and kindness are more important than adhering to any particular teachings about faith. One respondent spoke of spirituality in terms of living in harmony with the world, and this seems to fit Inger as well. She moves through the Borgen home with an ease, grace, and peace of mind that contrasts sharply with the conflicted and brooding behavior of the men around her. It's because of these qualities that her suffering and death register so poignantly.
But, then, there is that miracle that ends the film. Interestingly, in the play, Munk offers the possibility of a rational explanation for the astounding event. He sets it up in the third act with some dialogue between the doctor and the village's new pastor, in which the former complains that the local death certificates are not filled out by a qualified physician. Then, near the end, when Inger arises at Johannes's beckoning, the doctor says ("decisively," according to the stage directions), "These amateur death certificates must be done away with."[8] This would suggest—to the rationalists in the audience, anyway—that Inger was not dead but only comatose. Dreyer's film contains no such suggestion, however; Inger's resurrection is a miracle plain and simple. In this, the filmmaker is more audacious than the dramatist.
One reason the ending bothered me so much involves the film's twentieth-century setting and overall naturalism. Although the surroundings are rustic, the world of the movie is also one in which neighbors communicate by telephone and the doctor comes and goes by car. Compare this setting to that of Bergman's The Virgin Spring (1960), which also ends with a miracle. That film is based on a traditional ballad and set in a medieval Sweden where Christian beliefs have barely supplanted ancient Nordic ones. Thus, when the miracle occurs—a spring suddenly gushes forth at the site of a young girl's rape and murder (fig. 5)—the setting and characters, though realistically rendered, are sufficiently remote from our own, sufficiently exotic, to allow us to accept it as we would fantastic phenomena in a folktale or myth. Lacking such distancing, Ordet is a bit harder to swallow as the allegory it's often said to be.[9]
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| Fig. 5: The miracle that concludes Bergman's The Virgin Spring. |
I was further annoyed by the way the ending seemed to deny so much that came before. While searching for books and articles that might shed further light on the film (something I often do when a movie deeply affects me), I came across an insightful essay by the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, whose initial reaction to Ordet was remarkably like my own. A self-described atheist, he says that when he first saw it at age eighteen, more than fifty years ago, "it infuriated me, possibly more than any other film has, before or since. . . . The fact that Ordet . . . ends with a Christian miracle after very persuasively sowing religious
doubts and skepticism for roughly its first two hours seemed like an
ultimate gesture of hypocrisy and deceit. And maybe because I’d been
sufficiently moved and even devastated by the preceding tragic story . . . I was especially ill-prepared
for the coup de théâtre and miracle of [Inger's] sudden resurrection. . . . As far as I could tell, this was as crass an
about-face as a film could make—a cynical reversal whereby everything
the film had been carefully propounding about the futile despair that
often derives from faith and religious belief was instantaneously and
inexplicably refuted."[10]
Rosenbaum now considers Ordet "one of the greatest of all films."[11] I confess that my own level of admiration hasn't reached that point yet—the ending still perplexes me too much—but I do consider it must viewing for any thoughtful cinephile. Be warned, however: in addition to its befuddling outcome, it makes no concessions to popular taste in its technique and presentation. Dreyer's rigorous style—with its intricately choreographed pans and tracking shots, long takes, tableau compositions, scarcity of closeups, and unconventional editing—will strain the patience of many viewers unprepared for it. Plus, both here and in his other films, Dreyer embraced slow pacing as an artistic principle because he wanted audiences to reflect on what they were seeing and hearing and not merely respond viscerally to it.[12]
That uncompromising style had a lot to do with Rosenbaum's reevaluation of Ordet and his conclusion that "there is surely no other experience in cinema that comes close to it." He points, in particular, to one justifiably famous shot that occurs while the doctor is still trying to save Inger's life. In the adjoining parlor, little Maren sits with Johannes and asks him whether he will raise her mother from the dead should she not survive (unlike the adults, Maren doesn't think her uncle is crazy). In a single take lasting over three minutes, the two quietly converse, with Johannes expressing doubt that "the others" will allow him to do what Maren asks of him (fig. 6). Rosenbaum describes the staging of the shot as follows: "The camera appears to move very slowly around them in almost a full circle while the scenery in the room appears to glide correspondingly around them. And yet the camera never frames these characters from behind at any point in its nearly 360-degree rotation. They remain positioned either frontally or in profile, with Maren lit more brightly than Johannes throughout the scene."[13]
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| Fig. 6: As the room seems to revolve around them, Maren asks her uncle Johannes to perform a miracle if her mother should die. |
I think Rosenbaum might be placing too much weight on the shoulders of a single shot, whatever the marvels of its conception and execution. As I watched the movie a second and third time, I noticed that "miracles" are in fact referenced throughout, mostly in the dialogue that Dreyer adapted from the original play. I mentioned one example in my plot summary above—the exchange between Morten and the doctor. To name a couple more: Early on, Inger tells the despairing Morten, who laments that "miracles don't happen anymore," that she thinks "a lot of little miracles happen secretly." Later, the pastor and the doctor debate whether there was ever an "age of miracles" and, if so, why it has now passed. But most telling is a moment that is absent from the play; it occurs during the scene at the Petersens' home when Morten and Peter are debating theology and the future of their children. Dreyer cuts away briefly to the adjoining kitchen where Anders, Anne, and Mrs. Petersen sit around a table with an open Bible before them. Mrs. Petersen calls attention to one of its illustrations, which we see in closeup: a depiction of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (fig. 7). If that isn't foreshadowing, what is?
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| Fig. 7: The Bible illustration that foreshadows Inger's eventual resurrection. |
And here's another intriguing wrinkle: according to Rosenbaum, Dreyer was not especially religious, at least not in any traditional sense.[15] He did hold some quasi-mystical views—I think you can safely call them "spiritual"—which he supported with some odd references to Einstein's theory of relativity as well as to the "psychic research" of Aldous Huxley and others. "New perspectives," wrote Dreyer in a 1957 letter to the journal Film Culture, "are opened up that make one realize an intimate connection between exact science and intuitive religion."[16] To me, this line of thinking seems as dubious as any religious orthodoxy. But then, my own views don't have to match those of an artist for me to appreciate the art, and Dreyer's is an art I definitely appreciate. Ultimately, I agree with Rosenbaum when he says that "the film poses an irresolvable challenge to believers and nonbelievers alike. . . . The experience of the film demands a certain struggle, and the fact that it can't be easily processed or rationalized or filed away is surely what keeps it alive and worrying."[17]
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| Fig. 8: Inger arises from her coffin to embrace Mikkel. |
[1] I've reproduced this exchange from memory, as I was unable to find a YouTube video or written source verifying precisely what was said and on what program the interview appeared (I think it was the Today Show). While my reproduction of Dafoe's words may not be exactly what he said, I'm confident that it qualifies as "words to that effect." Unfortunately, I can't recall whether the actor elaborated on his answer in any way.
[2] I'm grateful to Neal for allowing me to quote from his posts.
[3] Happily, this movie can also be streamed via the newly launched Criterion Channel. The advent of this streaming service should cause any ardent cinephile to rejoice.
[4] Interestingly, the movie's onscreen credits include neither Dreyer's name nor those of any of his actors and crew. The sole credit reads: "Kaj Munk / Ordet."
[5] Kaj Munk, The Word, in Five Plays by Kaj Munk, tr. R. P. Keigwin (New York: American Scandinavian Foundation, 1951), 87–148.
[6] In the play, Johannes, not Inger, plays the more prominent role. Another significant change Dreyer made involves the reason for Johannes's insanity. In Munk's play, the precipitating trauma was the death of Johannes's fiancée. Dreyer's film places the blame solely on his intense theological study. In one of the movie's rare jokes, the village's new pastor asks Mikkel whether Johannes was the victim of an unhappy love affair. "No," says Mikkel. "It was Søren Kierkegaard."
[7] It's been noted that the Petersens represent a conservative evangelical movement known as the Church Association for the Inner Mission in Denmark, or simply the Inner Mission. The Borgens' faith is more characteristic of the Danish Lutheran mainstream, as fathered by N. F. S. Grundtvig. (Click on the links for the appropriate Wikipedia articles.)
[8] Munk, The Word, 134, 148.
[9] There are also hints of the supernatural in Dreyer's preceding film, Day of Wrath, but as in The Virgin Spring, those elements are made more palatable by the remote setting—seventeenth-century Denmark—and the general air of superstition that permeates that milieu. And, of course, there is Dreyer's 1932 horror film, Vampyr, which is pure, highly stylized fantasy.
[10] Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Mise en Scène as Miracle in Dreyer's Ordet," in Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 229–30.
[11] Ibid., 230.
[12] For a thorough analysis of Dreyer's techniques and stylistic strategies, see David Bordwell, The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Bordwell's strict formalist approach can be frustrating if you're looking for thematic interpretation, however, so his book is best read alongside other works on Dreyer. Tom Milne's The Cinema of Carl Dreyer (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1971), a basic introduction, is a good place to begin. Raymond Carney's Speaking the Language of Desire: The Films of Carl Dreyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) is a more difficult study—sometimes bordering on impenetrable—but nonetheless provocative. Carney's book explicitly tries to strike a balance between formal and thematic criticism, and his chapter on Ordet offers the best analysis of the interrelationship of its style and meaning that I've read so far. (Unfortunately, all three of these books appear to be out of print, although used copies can be purchased online.)
[13] Rosenbaum, "Mise en Scène as Miracle," 237.
[14] Ibid., 237–38. Bordwell, in The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, 156, states matter-of-factly that Dreyer tracked and panned to achieve the effect, but Rosenbaum finds the "rotating surface" explanation more likely.
[15] Rosenbaum, "Mise en Scène as Miracle," 232–33. To support this claim, Rosenbaum cites two sources: Maurice Drouzy's 1982 biography, which has appeared in French and Danish editions but not in English translation; and a friend of Dreyer's, Ib Monty, with whom he spoke personally. One can certainly be forgiven for thinking that the director was a practicing Christian, given the number of films he made with strong Christian elements. Besides Ordet, key examples include the aforementioned Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath, as well as the Intolerance-inspired Leaves from Satan's Book (1921). Also, a film about the life of Jesus was Dreyer's never-realized dream project.
[16] Quoted in Rosenbaum, "Mise en Scène as Miracle," 234. Rosenbaum characterizes Dreyer's reasoning in the letter, which the director wrote in response to criticism that he'd rejected science in favor of religious miracles, as "rather curious and convoluted" (233). Rosenbaum also notes that Dreyer's appeal to "psychic research" indicates "a sort of early invocation of 'new age' beliefs that reconcile or at least claim to reconcile the separate claims of science and religion" (235).
[17] Ibid., 230.
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