The Manifestation of God in the Context of the Seventh Seal: An Existential Confrontation Between Fear and Love

Abstract

Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) is among the cult films that have given concrete cinematic form to philosophical issues such as the crisis of meaning, the fear of death, the relationship between God and humanity, and the tension between individual and institutional religion. Within the possibilities of cinema, the film presents to the viewer the inner turmoil these themes create in the individual and how that turmoil is reflected through the lens of faith. By bringing together Heidegger's anxiety, Kierkegaard's paradox of faith, Descartes' Cogito, and Nietzsche's nihilism, Bergman gives concrete form in the film to the individual's crisis of meaning and to the way the Church's religious narrative shapes the individual's world of faith. He also addresses how the Church-monopolized religious narrative, dominant in the medieval Western world and frequently reliant on fear, opened the door to problems in social life and in the search for meaning, giving rise to a crisis of individual belief. The film's main character, Knight Block, accepts God's existence but questions God's nature and seeks certainty about God's essence. Nietzsche, while stating that truth is a kind of illusion, also asserts that this illusion is the reason that a type of living being clings to life not only through mental comprehension but also through submission to divine power and through grounding reality in existing laws. Block pursues a genuine truth beyond the illusion of truth. The film also addresses death, foregrounding its cold and gloomy aspects and assigning it a share in the crisis of life's meaning. In the first section of the study, the objects of love and fear used as expressions of God in Western medieval theology will be discussed. Subsequently, the anxieties inherent in absurd existence and the themes of confronting death will be examined from a philosophical perspective. In this study, descriptive and interpretive analytical methods from qualitative research were employed.

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