By Kamila Soh

“Man is constituted in such a way that, on the one hand, he needs to be forced, through inspiration, out of the self-sufficiency of his own thinking – through an event, therefore, that lies beyond his disposing power, an event that comes to him only in the form of something unpredictable.”

Josef Pieper, from ‘Divine Madness: Plato’s Case Against Secular Humanism’

‘Ordet’ – ‘The Word’ – was produced by Danish director Carl Theodor Freyer in 1955. Looking up the movie, you would most likely stumble upon the iconic image from the opening scene, where the character Johannes stands above the tall grass like a Christ figure. He looks straight ahead, with his right hand pointing beyond and his left hand lowered, as if in awe of beholding a mysterious other.

It is a captivating image reminiscent of the hand gestures of Orthodox icons, which point to the divine and beckons the viewer to share in this contemplation. Yet, it is also unsettling. As Johannes stands eerily still amidst the billowing chaff, his grave expression seems to bear an ominous foreboding of things to come.

This scene, where we first encounter Johannes, directly acquaints us with his defining characteristic: his claims to be Jesus Christ. Throughout the film, we see him as a ‘mad’ figure, drifting in and out of scenes like a wanderer from a foreign world. His words often echo Jesus’ words, lamenting the people’s lack of faith and how, owing to this, he is unable to perform miracles in the town.

Johannes lives in a rural farmhouse with his widowed father, Morten, his younger brother Anders, and his older brother Mikkels, who is married to Inger and expecting their third child. Morten is a devoutly religious man who laments the loss of Johannes’ sanity, while being burdened by Mikkels’ lack of belief. However, Inger, who is full of faith, comforts Morten and defends Mikkels, saying that while he may not believe, he has a heart full of goodness. Anders, on the other hand, is set on marrying Anne, the daughter of Peter the tailor, who is also the leader of a local religious sect whose ways are at odds with Morten’s ideas of organized religion.

The threads of the otherwise humdrum life of the Borgens start to unravel when Anders’ plan to propose to Anne brings out the stubbornness of his father Morten, who insists that they cannot get married because they are of different denominations. Peter demonstrates a mutual staunchness, driving Anders out of his house when Anders asks his permission to marry his daughter. In the midst of these dramas, Ingers goes into labour, but it soon becomes apparent that there are complications in the birth and that both the mother and the baby’s lives are at risk.

It is easy to dismiss Johannes earlier in the film, as his words seem wildly absurd and out of place. The Borgens simply brush away his sayings, and attribute his oddities to having been driven mad while studying the works of Søren Kiekagaard. However, as the film progresses, Johannes’ words begin to take a hold of reality, and even comes to predict the future as he foreshadows the death of Ingers and her unborn child. A figure once ignored, he soon becomes the voice of clarity amidst the chaos, unsettling us as we absorb the words which were once so easier pushed aside and labelled as ‘madness’.

What exactly is this ‘madness’? First of all, I do not believe that the film intends madness to be a portrayal of mental illness. Rather, it is more akin to Plato’s ‘divine madness,’ or ‘theia mania,’ as unpacked by the German philosopher Josef Pieper. Pieper claims through Plato’s thesis that it is the God-given state of “being-beside-oneself,” where we come to know the limitations of our human nature, while at the same time recognizing its infinite openness and capacity through divine provocation. One of the dimensions of this divine madness is that of prophecy, and this can be seen in Johannes, whose words bear the intrusive and violent nature of ‘raptus,’ as used by St Thomas Aquinas. This ‘seizing’ or ‘capturing,’ as it translates to, pertains to a higher power that lifts us from those things of our nature, to that which is beyond our nature.

With this in mind, it is worthwhile to observe that Johannes’ words only begin to take hold in the Borgen household, when they are stripped of their self-sufficiency. Mikkels realizes that he is about to lose Ingers, who is the centre of his life. Morten and Peter seem to be at irreconcilable odds about their beliefs, and Anders and Anne’s futures lie in uncertainty amidst their fathers’ tension. It is only when they all arrive in this place of abject helplessness, that Johannes’ words find an opening to resound more penetratingly than before.

This comes to its climax in the final scene, where Johannes returns, after having disappeared following the death of Inger. He arrives just in time for Inger’s wake and we see a change in his disposition: he is calmer, and his eyes have lost their glazed detachment from before. It is clear that Inger’s death has provided the ‘shock’ necessary to shake him back into sanity, as put by his doctor. But then he looks about once again, and echoes the same words lamenting the lack of faith to perform miracles, claiming that if it were for their faith, he could raise Inger from the dead.

There is a palpable confusion in the room as the people marvel at the return of his mental presence while still insisting in the same ‘mad’ thoughts as before. Everyone resists, except Maven, Mikkels and Inger’s oldest daughter. She was the only person following her mother’s labour who believed in Johannes’ ability to raise her mother from the dead.

Like the two gathered in Christ’s name, they join hands and pray to God for their miracle. Slowly but surely, Inger does arise, and Mikkels rushes to embrace her, sobbing and shaking. Throughout this scene, we see Mikkels at his most vulnerable. The one of no faith, yet possessing a heart full of goodness, is the only one who cries out in anguish as he realises that without Inger, he had nothing to live for and is left in utter despair.

In the end, it is this very acknowledgement of his own nothingness and frailty that opens Mikkels’ heart to God. In Mikkels, we see how the workings of God meet us at the depths of our humanity. As Caryll Houselander once said: “He wants us to seek, because He wants to give Himself to us. It is an experience like the experience of emptiness: the emptiness must be there that He may fill it: and we must be aware of it in order that we may want Him to fill it.”

Johannes, the uninvited prophet, comes to subvert our expectations and shake us out of our complacency. Through him we are reminded of the divine ‘madness’ of the saints, a deliberate spanner in the works who provokes an awareness of the divine, if we have the heart to perceive it.