What ‘The Seventh Seal’ Tells Us About Life And Death – The Federalist

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman produced The Seventh Seal in 1957. As with all great works of art, it still speaks as clearly to us today as it ever did to folk in its own time and place. The movie is a profound meditation on man, God, and the relationship between them. Looking at the film through existential philosophy can help draw out its main implications about the meaning of being human.

First, a short synopsis of the plot. The main character of the film is a Knight who is returning home, disillusioned and exhausted, from the Crusades. While he is resting on a beach, he runs into the figure of Deatha man dressed in a black, monkish cowl. When Death asks the Knight if hes afraid, the Knight responds: My body is afraid, but I am not. Then he challenges Death to a game of chess.

The rest of the film is just about the Knight encountering different people and trying to find some meaning with what time he has left as he continues to play for his life (with the rule that he can keep living as long the game is in progress).

The first scene itself is enough for you to see that theres something strange about this guy. When the average person runs into Death, he would probably lose his mind with fear. But this Knight stays perfectly calm, and greets Death as an old friend. So, whats going on?

The philosopher Sren Kierkegaard, whos often thought of as the father of existentialism, can help bring some insight to this situation. Kierkegaards main motto is that subjectivity is truth. Hes not looking for objective, scientific knowledge, but starts with the individual human soul, and that souls first-person experience of the world.

This point becomes clear in Kierkegaards view on the question of immortality. In his major work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he says:

The very moment I am conscious of my immortality, I am completely subjective, and I cannot become immortal in partnership in rotation with two other single gentlemen. Subscription collectors who produce long subscription lists of men and women who feel a need in general to become immortal receive no benefit for their trouble, because immortality is a good that cannot be obtained by bullying ones way with a long list of signatures.

As it is with immortality, so it is with God. In a way, theres no question of whether you believe in him or not. You either know that God is real or you dont, in the same way that you sense your own immortality or you dont. Its kind of like being in love, as well: if you need to ask ten of your friends if youre really in love, then the odds are, youre not. Scientific confirmation from a multitude of other gentlemen (as Kierkegaard might put it) isnt going to help. Either your soul knows or it doesnt, and thats all there is to it.

Kierkegaard would call the first kind of person the aesthetic type, and the second the ethical-religious type. The aesthetic type thinks any talk of immortality is just silly, since that kind of person cant see anything other than the surface of the world as it appears to his senses. The ethical-religious type, though, has deeper intuitions in his soul. Maybe the Knight can look Death square in the eyes because he is this type of man.

The Knight starts off in despair. He confesses: I live now in a world of phantoms, a prisoner of my own dreams. He also yells at God for making himself so difficult to understand and be sure of. According to Kierkegaard, though, most people are in a state of despairin fact, theyre so far in that they dont even realize theyre in despair. The Knights self-awareness of despair thus becomes a key step toward his redemption. The Knight spends the rest of the film overcoming this curse, trying to do a good deed and treating others with unpretentious kindness.

If you want to see why this makes the Knight special, consider a scene in the film of a brawl at some tavern. It reveals the way the average, aesthetic (as opposed to ethical-religious) person tends to conduct himself. As Death himself says: Most people give no thought to death and nothingness.

At the tavern, the whole crowd picks on a Jestera socially awkward dreamer with a kind heart. They act with collective, wanton cruelty and self-abandon (led by a morally bankrupt theologian, no less). Of course, they think nothing of this: they neither know nor care about whether they even have souls, let alone what their actions will do to their souls.

The Knight, on the other hand, befriends the Jester. By the end of the film, the Knight is able to say the following words to the Jesters wife, after her family treats him to a picnic: I will remember this moment: the stillness, the dusk, these wild strawberries, this bowl of milk. Your faces in the evening light. Ill hold this memory between my hands like a bowl of fresh milk full to the brim. Mikael asleep, Jof with his lyre. Ill try to remember what we spoke of. And it will be a sign, for mea source of great satisfaction.

Afterwards, he laughs in the face of Death. Thats his redemption, his reward, for being an ethical-religious man.

Ever since the Enlightenment, the meaning of the word God has become fuzzy. Ren Descartes is a key culprit. He developed a philosophy of reason in which God turned into nothing more than some vague and abstract ideaa premise that was needed to fix the argument, but without having any inherent value; a figure for purely logical thought.

Descartes did try to anchor his argument on the idea that this world must be real and meaningful, as opposed to some monstrous deception, because God is good. But this is weak, weak stuff. (In his defense, at least he lived long before movies such as The Matrix or The Truman Show.) In Descartes philosophy, God is just a placeholder; he might as well not exist. It makes sense, then, that many later rationalists just dropped God altogether.

This is very different from the proclamation of the Gospel, which insists the Lord is a specific, actual person: not some pie-in-the-sky abstraction, but a truly living presence. Not a figure for logical thought, but a relationship for the passionate heart. This can be called the existential, as opposed to rationalistic, conception of God. It can also be called the idea of the true God, if you believe in the Gospel; and this idea underlies the worldview of The Seventh Seal.

Kierkegaards motto that subjectivity is truth has been all but lost. A lot of people, especially millennials, have an actual belief system where they refuse to trust anything but their physical senses, or what can be verified with the scientific method. But God and immortality and love have nothing to do with the scientific method; you cant ask ten gentlemen to verify them for you.

Thats because these are not objective things. These are things you can only see for yourself, on the basis of individual, subjective courage. If we start with the premise that our souls intuitions are nothing but delusions, theres no hope of getting anywhere.

When you face Death, a vague idea isnt going to save you. Nor is the agnostic weakness of saying you just dont know. Whats really needed is a living presence within the heartsomething that your soul knows to be at least as real as anything else in this world.

The Knight had that, and its why he could carry himself the way he did. Its like the presence of Death outside of him was outweighed by the presence of Life within him. Its Kierkegaards existentialism, and not Descartess rationalism, that well all need in the end, if we want any real answers to the mortal problem of meaning. Thats at least one thing to learn from Bergmans film.

Sethu A. Iyer went to school at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a freelance writer and the author of "Testament: An Invitation to Lucid Romance."

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What 'The Seventh Seal' Tells Us About Life And Death - The Federalist