How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!1
At the end of Winter Light, the second film in Ingmar Bergman’s early 1960s faith trilogy, Tomas Ericsson, a pastor in the grip of a faith crisis, intones the Sanctus: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory.”
As is often the case in Bergman’s movies, it’s an ambiguous moment. On the one hand, the scene might be brutally ironic: a pastor who no longer believes in God mouths a liturgical declaration of divine omnipresence. On the other, the very fact that Tomas, despite his crisis, can still bring himself to utter the Sanctus suggests that his dark night of the soul just might not be the final word.
Winter Light is the second film in Bergman’s faith trilogy. It’s also, in my opinion, his finest.2 If you missed my discussion of Through a Glass Darkly, the trilogy’s first film, you can read it here. If you haven’t seen Winter Light, you might want to view it before reading any further. It’s streamable on YouTube here. My reflections on the trilogy’s concluding film, The Silence, will appear in the next few weeks.
Plot
Set in Uppland, a region north of Stockholm, in the dead of winter, Bergman’s film follows Tomas Ericsson (Gunnar Björnstrand3) for three hours on a Sunday afternoon. The movie opens with him distributing communion at a noon service in one of the rural churches he pastors and ends with him beginning vespers at the other. He’s suffering from the flu.4
During those three hours we meet several members of his scant congregation: Jonas and Karin Persson (Max von Sydow and Gunnel Lindblom), his sybaritic organist Fredrik Blom (Olof Thunberg), the sexton Algot Frövik (Allan Edvall) and, very briefly, Magdalena Ledfors (Elsa Ebbensen), a pious elderly woman. Most importantly, we also meet Märta Lundberg (Ingrid Thulin), the local school teacher, which whom Tomas, a widower, has a torturous on-and-off again relationship. Märta is an atheist.
At his worried wife’s urging, Jonas, a rather simple-minded fisherman, comes to Tomas for counseling following the first church service. He’s tormented by fear of a global nuclear war which fuels what’s clearly a preexisting tendency toward depression.5 Tomas’ response to Jonas’ anxiety is worse than awful, as we’ll see, and a despairing Jonas shoots himself shortly afterwards.
Also between services, Tomas reluctantly opens a long letter from Märta in which she confronts him about his coldness and occasional cruelty to her as well as his seeming inability or refusal to love. (In a breathtaking six-minute segment, Thulin, staring straight into the camera, recites the letter. It’s one of the most remarkable performances I’ve ever seen.) Later, in a face-to-face confrontation with Märta, the ailing and testy Tomas launches a brutal verbal attack, telling her that she sickens him—“I’m tired of your loving care!” (59:00)—that he’s never loved her, and that she’ll never measure up to his dead wife. But after calming down, he realizes he’s overstepped and timdily invites her to accompany him to his second, three-o’clock service. It’s the closest he can come to an apology.
It’s in the second church that Algot Frövik, a hunchback who lives in perpetual physical pain, speculates in a conversation with Tomas that Jesus’ sense of spiritual abandonment at the Crucifixion—“My God, why have you forsaken me?!”— must’ve been far more tormenting than his few hours of physical suffering on the cross. Anyone can endure physical pain, says Frövik, if they know it’ll eventually come to an end. But what could be worse than “God’s silence”? Who wouldn’t be crushed by that?
As he listens to Frövik, the anguish on Tomas’ face is excruciating to see. He knows the abandoned Christ’s despair. He too dwells in the icy vacuum of divine silence: old December’s bareness everywhere.
At film’s end, in the cold church austerely lit by the sinking winter sun, Tomas begins the final service of the day. Before a congregation of one—Märta—he recites the Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy.
Scared to Love
In her letter, Märta confesses that she finds Christianity’s fidelity to a crucified god “obscure and neurotic.”6 Nevertheless, given that fidelity, there’s one thing about Tomas she’s “never been able to fathom: your peculiar indifference to Jesus Christ.” (32:00)
This insight on her part is key to understanding Tomas’ crisis of faith: his inability to offer and accept genuine love. As Bergman said of him, “The pastor is dying emotionally. He exists beyond love, actually beyond all human relations.”7 Tomas’ “indifference” to Christ—or, in more traditional terms, the absence of a personal relationship with the Savior, surely startling in a clergyperson—is one sign of this inability. Others are scattered throughout the film.
In the movie’s opening scene, for example, Tomas’ distribution of communion is conducted in a frigid manner: flat voice, expressionless face, aloof body posture. Clearly there’s more than just the altar rail separating him from the communicants. Bergman underscores Tomas’ robotic detachment by contrasting it with a closeup of the face of Magdalena, the pious elderly woman, when she receives the consecrated wafer. It’s suffused with love and reverence. Tomas may be in crisis, but she’s in ecstasy.
The same inability to relate meaningfully to others, much less love them, is revealed in Tomas’ dealings with Jonas and then, after his suicide, with his widow Karin. Instead of offering the fisherman counseling or comfort, Tomas undercuts the possibility of hope by drowning Jonas in his personal anguish over God’s silence. He’s so fixated on his own pain—“I’m no good as a clergyman!” (39:43)— that he has no time for anyone else’s. Jonas’ desperate need for succour goes unmet. Little wonder that the unhappy man shoots himself soon afterwards. When Tomas visits Karin to break the news of her husband’s death, he’s just as coldly impersonal as he was when distributing communion. All he can offer Karin is an awkward: “Do you want to read the Bible together?” (1:07:18) She, sensing his emotional and spiritual inability to genuinely empathize with her pain, declines—much to Tomas’ relief.
Even Tomas’ past relationship with his wife seems not to have been as loving as he wants to remember it. Toward the film’s end, the organist, a bit tipsy (in vino veritas), suggests that the marriage in fact was toxically disfunctional. One suspects that Tomas, like many people who insulate themselves from the messiness of actual relationships with concrete persons, has romanticised his memories of the marriage.
Märta’s open self-giving is in stark contrast to Tomas’ closed-down self-absorption. For all her shortcomings—she has a tendency toward self-pity tinged with passive-aggression—Märta’s capable of genuine love. Despite Tomas’ verbal and emotional abuse of her, she cares deeply for him and believes, naively, perhaps, but authentically, that her love can save him. “You must learn to love,” she tells him (24:51), and she’s eager to teach him. For her, love means “to live for someone else” (35:32), and this makes her, an atheist, more able to relate to Jesus than Tomas. In the film’s opening scene, she surprises Tomas by coming to the altar rail to receive communion. When Tomas asks her why, she simply replies: “It’s a love feast, isn’t it?” (22:41)8
The Echo-God & the Problem of Evil
Opening oneself up to giving and receiving love entails vulnerability. Those whom we love might break our hearts, either through betrayal or because their suffering causes us pain. For some people, and Tomas seems to be one of them, this is too risky.
Throughout the film we learn that he’s witnessed suffering in the world, and there’s every reason to suppose that his reponse to it has been to protect himself by shutting his eyes to it—again, a counterintuitive move in a clergyperson. As a young man he pastored a congregation in Spain during its bloody civil war. Later, he endured the illness and death of his wife. He hears but refuses to allow himself to be touched by Jonas’ despair. And we know that when Märta once came down with a bad case of disfiguring eczema, he turned away from her open sores in revulsion. Tomas wants to ensconce himself in an antiseptic world where suffering is just an abstract idea. He wants no personal contact with humanity’s wounds.
Nor does he want the God he serves to be touched by the world’s ugliness, because that would force him to face it himself. This is why he’s indifferent to Christ, whose embrace of lepers and messy death repulses him as much as Märta’s sores. So God becomes another abstraction, a safely lifeless icon, an “echo-god” feedback loop.
“Picture my prayers to an echo-god, who gave benign answers and reassuring blessings. Every time I confronted god with the realities I witnessed, he turned into something ugly and revolting. A spider god,9 a monster. So I sought to shield him from life, clutching my image of him to myself in the dark.” (40:07)
Yet despite his mental and spiritual contortions to protect his echo-god and himself from the world’s pain, Tomas can’t completely block it out, nor the nagging conundrum that’s haunted the Church for two millennia: the problem of evil. If God—the God proclaimed in Scripture, not a false echo-god projection—is good, why does God allow the innocent to suffer? The burden of this scandalous contradiction is always felt by Tomas. Even if he shields himself from the wounds of others, he can’t deny his own spiritual suffering. Why would a good God permit his turmoil? Why would He remain silently absent? Why would he abandon Tomas in a bleak wintry interior landscape? The stubborn problem of evil keeps breaking through all his defense mechanisms. Despite his best efforts, he and his the echo-god are uneasy.
The tension comes to a head in Tomas’ self-absorbed soliloquy during his meeting with the despairing Jonas. He suddenly experiences what he considers to be a breakthrough that liberates him from God and, consequently, the problem of evil. He will simply deny God’s existence. If there is no God, there’s no need to worry about compatibilizing divine goodness with innocent suffering. God went silent on Tomas. Now Tomas goes silent on God. Doubting Tomas becomes Denying Tomas.
“If there is no god . . . life would become understandable. What a relief. And thus death would be [nothing but] a snuffing out of life. The dissolution of body and soul. Cruelty, loneliness, and fear—all these things would be straightforward and transparent. Suffering is incomprehensible, so it needs no explanation. There is no creator. No sustainer of life. No design.” (41:37)
Yet the breakthrough, depriving him as it does of any god whatsoever, is crushing. Almost immediately Tomas feels its weight and moans the dying words of the Jesus Märta claims he’s indifferent to: “God . . . . why have you forsaken me?” (43:15) Then, collapsing in front of the church altar, he says: “Now I’m free. Free at last . . . . I had this fleeting hope that everything wouldn’t turn out to be illusions, dreams, and lies.” (44:45) His freedom carries a higher price than he anticipated: utter abandonment.
This is the void into which his fear of love has hurled him.
Communion
There are two devout Christians in Winter Light: Magdalena, the elderly pious woman and Algot Frövik, the hunchbacked sexton. Magdalena has but a handful of lines in the film (45:56), but Algot is a major player, although his big scene doesn’t come until the end of the movie.
Speaking with Tomas right before the start of the 3:00 o’clock service, Algot reveals that he’s been thinking about Christ’s Passion. Given his own chronic pain, he can relate to the physical suffering endured on the Cross. But surely, he says, the Church’s emphasis on it is somewhat exaggerated. “It may sound presumptuous of me, but in my humble way, I’ve suffered as much physical pain as Jesus. And his torments were rather brief, lasting some four hours, I gather.” (1:12:54)
No, continues Algot, Jesus’ true suffering was spiritual.
“I feel Jesus was tormented far worse on another level . . . . Just think of Gethsemane. Christ’s disciples fell asleep. They hadn’t understood the meaning of the last supper or anything. And when the servants of the law appeared, they ran away and Peter denied him. Christ had known his disciples for three years. They’d lived together day in and day out, but they never grasped what he meant. They abandoned him, down to the last man. He was left all alone . . . . To be abandoned when you need someone to rely on. That must be excruciatingly painful.” (1:13:16)
But the sense of abandonment experienced by Jesus went even deeper. Jesus felt forsaken by God.
“He thought that his heavenly Father had abandoned him. He believed everything he’d ever preached was a lie. In the moments before he died, Christ was seized by doubt. Surely that must have been his greatest hardship? God’s silence.” (1:14:32)
God’s silence. Divine abandonment. Exactly the torment Tomas is enduring, despite his earlier “breakthrough” to freedom. With Algot’s last two words ringing in his ears, Tomas leaves the sacristy, walks to the chapel altar, and begins the service. Holy, holy, holy.
I said earlier that Winter Light is ambiguous. Even though Bergman claims that the film was his final repudiation of his Christian upbringing, he also admits that its ending allows for two different interpretations:
“If one has religious faith, one would say that God has spoken to [Tomas]. If one does not believe in God, one might prefer to say that Märta Lundberg and Algot Frövik are two people who help raise a fellow human being who has fallen and is digging his own grave.”10
Unlike Bergman, I don’t think these two interpretations are incompatible.
The film’s Swedish title is Nattvardsgästerna or The Communicants. Most obviously, given the movie’s opening scene, “communicant” refers to those who receive the Body and Blood at the Eucharistic love feast. More broadly, a communicant is anyone in communion or oneness with others. Communion always implies love. We can communicate without love, and we can even belong to a loveless community. But communion is necessarily a bond of love.
Both Märta and Algot seek to rescue Tomas from his loveless isolation by bringing him into communion, Märta through her willingness to share his suffering and Algot, who displays a canny and sensitive awareness of his pastor’s inner turmoil by reminding him that Christ also endured spiritual doubt and emotional agony. Märta is intent on establishing human communion with Tomas. Algot aims to help Tomas establish spiritual communion with God by pointing out that Christ feels and shares his pain, something a mere echo-god can’t. The problem of innocent suffering remains unsolved. But its sting is at least somewhat softened by the realization that God is a fellow victim in communion with all sufferers. No human is ever really alone in his or her pain.
When Tomas stands before the altar at film’s end and intones Holy, holy, holy, I think he’s finally begun to recognize himself as a communicant, bound with Märta, Algot, the Perssons, Magdalena, Blom, and the Christ to whom his fear of love made him indifferent. He realizes he’s not isolated, and that his fellow sufferers—Märta, his parishioners, even God—need him. As Algot said, “To be abandoned when you need someone to rely on. That must be excruciatingly painful.” I suspect it’s only now that Tomas fully appreciates just how awful his abandonment of Jonas was. It’s now he realizes that God’s silence may be a graceful invitation to listen to the pain of others instead of being deafened by one’s own.11 In putting his own pain aside to conduct service in that cold and nearly empty church, he takes the first step toward listening.
Tomas’ dawning recognition isn’t a sudden conversion experience. To think otherwise is to cheapen it. Tomas is simply too wounded for a quick healing. Growing into love, accepting communion, will take time. But the worst of his faith crisis, his dark night of the soul, is passing. Winter light may be dim, but it offers enough illumination for the pilgrim to put one foot in front of the other. And sometimes that’s all that’s needed.
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Sonnet 97, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Washington Square Press, 2006), p. 213.
Bergman also thinks Winter Light his best film: “everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture.” Quoted in John Simon, Ingmar Bergman Directs (New York: Harcourt, 1972), p. 17.
Björnstrand found this a particularly difficult role. According to Bergman, it “made harsh demands on him. Gunnar found it painful to portray a person who was unsympathetic to such a degree. His inner turmoil became so acute that he had trouble remembering his lines, a problem that had never happened before.” Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, trans. Marianne Ruuth (New York: Arcade, 1994), p. 264.
Gunnar Björnstrand really was sick during the filming of Winter Light. Bergman insisted that he not treat his bronchitis until the shooting was done; he wanted to capture actual rather than simulated suffering.
Winter Light appeared in 1963, less than a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Jonas’ anxiety would’ve resonated with audiences.
This scene comes at 31:45 in the YouTube stream of Winter Light. For all subsequent quotations, I supply the timestamp parenthetically in the text.
Bergman, Images, p. 265,
If there’s a Christ-figure in this film, it’s probably Märta.
The spider god image also comes up, horrifically, in the climactic scene of Through a Glass Darkly, the first film in Bergman’s faith trilogy.
Bergman, Images, p. 271.
In reflecting on the ending of Winter Light, Bergman says that there’s one rule he always tries to follow: “irrespective of everything, you will hold your communion.” You will remember that you’re bound to other people—and, for the believer, to God. Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, trans. John Tate (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), p. 273.