Saturday, our regular "community night" coincided with Halloween, in honor of which several of us watched Ingmar Bergman's classic 1957 film, The Seventh Seal. I first saw The Seventh Seal (along with some of Bergman's other early religiously themed movies) back in my undergraduate college days, when I was living in Chelsea (then a relatively inexpensive, diverse, multi-class New York City neighborhood, unlike what it has since become. In that sense, today's Chelsea neighborhood is a metaphor for our country in this Reagan-Trump era). Bergman was very fashionable then, and the artsy Elgin theater on the corner of 8th Avenue and 19th Street showed his films somewhat regularly. It was part of the wider cultural horizon I was discovering and exploring in those days, while at the same time it connected (however ambivalently) with the long-term religious concerns that perpetually permeated my personal and intellectual investigations then and now.
The Seventh Seal is certainly not a typical contemporary Halloween movie. It is not a horror film, although it may seem somewhat scary in parts and in its style of presentation. It is certainly frightening in its ultimate implication - the fear that there is only "emptiness under the moon." Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), the son of a Lutheran minister who also served as chaplain to the King of Sweden, directed multiple movies, many of which were religiously themed or displayed intense religious resonances. The Seventh Seal is set in late medieval Sweden during the traumatic period of the Bubonic Plague ("the Black Death"). It stars Max von Sydow as Antonius Block, a Swedish knight returning (with his squire, Jöns) from the Crusades, who, while searching for meaning in a seemingly doomed world, meets and eventually plays chess with Death (played by Bengt Ekerot), presumably in an attempt to delay his own death. The film's title is based on the biblical Book of Revelation's "seventh seal," referenced both in the opening narration and again near the conclusion of the film. When the Lamb broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour (Revelation 8:1). The silence that follows the opening of the seal in the biblical narrative presumably reflects one of the film's central themes, God's "silence," (although the divine "silence" experienced in the film is potentially permanent and signifies a meaninglessness quite alien to the biblical silence).
A 1969 book by Canadian theologian Arthur Gibson, studying seven of Bergman's religiously themed films, was titled The Silence of God: Creative Response to the Films of Ingmar Bergman (Harper and Row). It is interesting to reread Gibson's take on The Seventh Seal, some 50+ years later and try to compare how I react to it now near the end of life versus when I read him in my youth. The same might be said for the movie itself, watching the film now, a half-century later, with all that has happened since then both in our world and in my own life after decades of religious community life and ministry. The "Black Plague" so prominent in the unfolding of the film obviously also resonates very differently now after our very recent plague-like experience of covid. That Plague is central to the way the film functions, although it is actually a historical anachronism. Antonius Block has just returned from the crusades, which would put him at the latest at the end of the 13th century (c.1291), while the Plague only reached Europe in 1347. The juxtaposition, however, has symbolic significance. The Crusades were an optimistic expression of European outreach attempting to restore what had been lost to the Islamic conquerers of the Christian Byzantine Empire's territories. Likewise, the post-war decade when The Seventh Seal was produced and the overall pre-covid secular world were expressions of an unparalleled humanistic optimism and confidence in reason, science, technology, and secular society in general. The medieval Plague produced a society seemingly stuck in a moment of despair. Analogously, we need only recall our own collective national nervous breakdown in 2020, that still lingers in our despairing, traumatized politics, completely undoing the optimistic self-confidence of the late 20th century..
Antonius Block's late medieval Sweden was, of course, Catholic. Hence Block's resort to the sacrament of penance (where, unfortunately, his confessor turns out to be his chess-partner Death himself). Bergman, however, was a 20th-century Swedish Protestant in his religious sensibility. So Block becomes a somewhat Luther-like figure, desperately seeking some guarantee of God, searching in his case for an intellectual certainty which will not be provided, a man alone in the universe with no mediating presence able either to reveal God to him or ease his path to God. Regardless of what the film may or may not have originally intended, it can certainly be seen as a depiction of a world without the Incarnation (or more precisely without faith in the Incarnation). Gibson appears to have recognized this. "The response demanded in the Christian dispensation," Gibson rightly recognizes, "is neither the mere intellectual assent to a series of propositions [Gibson's slam against Roman Catholicism] nor yet the blind faith in an unman [his implicit critique of Protestantism], but rather the personal acceptance of a divine person 'made man'."
in the film, the foil for Block's search for certitude is his squire Jöns, who accepts life as it is - as it presents itself - without further expectations. The interaction between the two is both comic and serious. There is also Joff, the performer, and his family, who represent a purer and simpler, if unquestioning life, and with whom Block finally finds an alternative to his isolation. To Joff in his simplicity and humility, are granted visions, including a beautiful vision of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and an alarming vision of the knight playing chess with death, which alerts him to the need for him and his family to escape.
The Seventh Seal's ending, however, dramatic, does not offer a neat resolution. In contrast, Bergman's 1960 medieval religious film The Virgin Spring (which Gibson does not include in his interpretation of Bergman's religious film) serves up a terrible tragedy, followed by righteous revenge and repentance. In his revenge and repentance, the prime protagonist (also played by Max von Sydow) likewise does not achieve certitude, confessing that he does not understand God, but he reconciles with God and vows to build a church at the sight of the tragedy, a site suddenly transformed into an apparent miraculous divine response.
Halloween may be a good occasion to see The Seventh Seal, not because of its potential for fright value, but because of what All Hallows' Eve was originally about - the triumph of the grace of Christ as evidenced in the saints - and in contrast to what it has increasingly become - a celebration of a resurgent paganism's challenge to Christianity. In The Seventh Seal, the witch, Tyan, trusts totally in the Devil and in the Devil's power to protect her. If Antonius Block is a metaphor for disillusioned modern rationalism, perhaps Tyan is the true metaphor for modernity's anxious pursuit of demonic power and modernity's restless search for fulfillment in all the wrong places.
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