DEKALOG I - ON FAITH, CERTAINTY, AND WHAT COMES AFTER CERTAINTY
Exegesis of a Moment #2
At the end of Dekalog I, the first of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s ten-part series of hour-long films, a man enters an empty church alone on a Polish winter night. The church is open to the cold air – it seems to have no door, instead its threshold is dominated by a cavity in the shape of a gigantic cross, and the whole building is buttressed with scaffolding as if at any moment it might fall. His footsteps resound as he approaches the makeshift-looking altar, the centrepiece of which is a candlelit painting of the Virgin Mary. He topples the altar, causing an upset candle above the painting to drip wax like tears onto the face of the icon. Tears streak his own cheeks as he looks into the font at the foot of the painting. He reaches in, and pulls from the font a disc of ice – the holy water frozen in the bitter night. He holds the dripping disc against his forehead.
I had tears in my own eyes rewatching this clip in preparation for what I’m about to write. Even as an isolated scene its power is overwhelming. But having seen the full film, I know what brought the man to this wintry and barren house of God.
For the majority of the film he lives with his twelve-year-old son, and shares with him his enthusiasm for scientific analysis, and the computer that he has set up in his apartment, which in its operation resembles a prototypical version of something like ChatGPT (Dekalog I was released in 1988). He asks and it answers. He encourages his son to engage with the computer, and together they enjoy coming up with questions to pose to it, as well as programming it to execute functions like the turning on and off of a tap.
When the boy finds a pair of skates that were supposed to be an early Christmas present, he wants to try them out on the nearby lake, which has frozen over. His father enters some calculations and the computer reassures him that the lake will easily withstand the boy’s weight. He also goes out in the night to investigate the ice himself, and is satisfied that it seems secure.
You’ve probably predicted what happens by now. The boy falls through the lake and dies.
The Warsaw-born Kieślowski is remembered mostly for his Colours Trilogy,1 but the Dekalog series sees him loosely weaving tales around each of the ten commandments in turn. In the case of Dekalog I: ‘I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me.’ If you’re looking for an endorsement on what to watch next, they don’t come much more emphatic than Stanley Kubrick’s appraisal of Kieślowski’s serialised ten-parter, which he said was ‘the only masterpiece he could ever think of.’
Kubrick understood the architecture of great scenes, and from a filmmaking perspective it’s hard not to be in awe at the elegantly self-contained finale of Dekalog I – it has within itself a symbolic consistency that resonates beneath the father-son story whose narrative it also completes. Stories told beneath the surface are always multiple, refractive, always only possible stories, inklings seen ‘through a glass, darkly’. They are stories we tell ourselves upon reflection. Any detail within this scene to which we apply our focus (the wax tears, the frozen water, the scaffolding) generates a different story from that nucleus. Subtext deepens a work of art beyond what even the artist can foresee, despite what Garth Marenghi might say.
To see a church scaffolded is not an unusual sight – the Sagrada Família church in Barcelona for example, which is still unfinished despite being under construction since 18822 – though it always feels like a striking example of the intrusion of the profane upon the sacred. Profane in the sense that it is prosaic; it gives the lie to the transcendental idea of the church building. Of course churches will always need repair, but seeing it has a similar effect to seeing the backstage of some grand production.
The church in Dekalog I, though, looks like somewhere hastily erected out of the bereft father’s sudden need for a place in which to grieve. A ramshackle edifice appearing to him as an envoy from some other world whose beauty it only hints at. The altar is a wooden board atop a loose stack of bricks, the doorless entranceway is a cross-shaped hole in the wall – a non-cross, as if it were still waiting for the arrival of the one that would come to fill it. It is a church of little foundation, unconsummated and subaltern even in its primary icon of worship.
But the man, too, has little foundation on which to stake a claim as a man of faith. He has come straight from the laboratory to the altar, so to speak. So when he holds the ice of the font against his forehead we feel the sharp sting of his severance from God. The man cannot be helped by what his heart has already rejected. The disc of ice is the body of Christ un-resurrected. And Mary weeps at this symbolic grave of her child, as the man weeps for his own son. Maybe in this, at least, there is some communion.
I grew up in a nominally Catholic environment. Liverpool is historically the most Catholic city in England, owing in large part to its considerable Irish heritage. My nan had an image of Jesus above her doorway. I attended a Catholic school in which we sang hymns and were made to recite The Lord’s Prayer at the end of each day. But I never heard my nan speak of God, and there seemed to be little to no effort on the part of the teachers at my school to explain why we praised and sang to him. Maybe the ones that did believe took for granted that we did too – that we grew up in religious households similar to their own, and therefore felt no need to justify their own belief. Maybe the ones that didn’t believe were simply going through the motions as most of us were, and taught us Bible parables as they might have taught us any other stories.
In reality it was lost on us. I can think of one child from my primary school who openly claimed to be religious, and we all thought she was joking. I still think she might have been. The repeated banging on about God from our teachers, in language and tones that seemed alien to us, only drove us further away from belief.3 I can’t consider myself a Catholic. Yes, I was educated in Biblical study,4 yes, I wore the word Catholic on the breast of my school uniform; but the word of God, spoken on the lips of teachers apathetic or ignorant to our scepticism, had little power to penetrate through to any kind of core. I am a child of the 1990s – by the time I reached school age, at least where I grew up, Catholicism felt like a relic from a past that even most of our parents couldn’t relate to, but that we were institutionally unable to let go of.
As we got older, and more stubbornly insistent on thinking for ourselves, it became pretty accepted among my age group that the Bible was a self-contradictory weapon of indoctrination, that most priests were paedophiles, that those of my peers who were beginning to deviate from sexual norms would find no more favour in the eyes of God than those who dared to wear two separate fabrics of clothing. The nuns who ran the all-girls school next to ours were spoken of as harsh and cold disciplanarians, and the nearby monastery seemed silent and ominous.5 On the topic of Christianity, disdain was pretty much the only accepted stance.
And yet plenty of people my age, myself included, received Confirmation. But nobody seemed to be giving a thought to the sacrament itself. What sacrament? What did that even mean to us? It was mostly an excuse to reconnect with old friends. So what if we didn’t believe what we said when we stood before the priest and committed ourselves to God. We had never believed. Tradition trundled on, and we enacted its performance, but for us God had been defanged, as unable to bestow a curse as he was a blessing. My generation was over God; we knew better.
But then, in my last year of school, we had an English teacher who finally opened up something inside of me that until then had remained closed. He showed us ‘the fresh green breast of the new world’, to quote one of his favourite passages from The Great Gatsby. He also told us that ‘To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.’6 This felt honest because it was sad, and so was I. It felt true, it connected, it was no longer just the appearance of meaning but meaning itself.
Sorrow breeds authenticity. And of course, there is possibly no story more wrought with profound sorrow than the one told in the Bible, but we were taught scripture without pathos. The Great Gatsby however, Death of a Salesman, the poetry of W.H. Auden… these were opened up to us.
Inauthenticity has always been anathema for me. Even to tell the smallest lie, a lie that would be to the benefit of everyone concerned, is a struggle. As a depressed 15-year-old, I was sick of the lifeless recounting of truths that had been flogged until they felt like lies. I needed immediacy. I needed the grey world to come back to life. I needed the new world.
I needed someone to tell me – to show me – that sadness and beauty go hand in hand, in order simply to see the things in front of me as things worth having again. I needed to read things like this:
‘Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And then one fine morning – So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’
There was always some precocious expectation in me that I was not going to get what I wanted. It persisted right alongside the hope that I would. I detested even as a young child when adults would say things like ‘When you get married, then you’ll understand.’ It was the same tone in which we were spoken to about God. ‘When Jesus did this, when God said this… this is what it means.’ Why the certainty? It seemed to me both the most blinkered and yet – I couldn’t deny – enviable thing to be able to speak of ifs as whens.
I think from a young age I was aware on some level of what one of Cormac McCarthy’s characters says in Cities of the Plain:
‘Men have in their minds a picture of how the world will be. How they will be in that world. The world may be many different ways for them but there is one world that will never be and that is the world they dream of.’
Maybe it was inevitable for a child which such a proclivity for dreaming as I had to come to such a realisation, and to develop a deep antipathy towards lying of any kind. A dreamer is as far from a liar as a unicorn is from a donkey.
I have never quite made the connection before now that my aversion to both inauthenticity and certainty are one and the same. Certainty is always inauthentic, always constructed. It is a self-delusion. To be human is to be uncertain.7 It is to hold a cup of sorrow in one hand and a cup of joy in the other and drink from both until the sobriety of reason dissolves and no proclamation can hold.
Certainty is the freezing of the water of life. The world becomes cold when you declare with finality. The religious tradition of my upbringing was cold in this way. We touched nothing and nothing touched us. We did not take the sacraments, we reenacted them, we did not eat the body of Christ, we ate thin white wafers, sipped some unpleasant wine and went back to our pews just waiting to be told that we could leave.
I remember how it felt, back then, to believe that the great mystery of religion was nothing more than a thin performance that could be seen through even by somebody as young as me. Catholicism was like a lake that had been frozen for so long even the clergy had forgotten about the water beneath. How could we believe under such conditions? What God were we really offered to believe in?
We were a generation ripe for life on social media. What symbolises the frozen surface of our lives more than our screens? Screens that flatten out realities and conceal the depths of everything “real” that they present to us. In their thrall we no longer swim; we skate along the surface. We scratch our names into the ice and call it art. We are like dancers at some global winter ball, skating across to regions where the ice becomes transparent and we can gaze voyeuristically below at someone else’s suffering or joy or outrage, all of it arranged like dioramas for our entertainment. Probably our own submerged dioramas are down there too, to be pointed out to friends – down there where the real world is. Where the water of life still flows. How charming a light the ice casts on those scenes. But we have forgotten that it is even possible for the ice to crack. And when we stop feeling the flow of those waters, and become accustomed to seeing the world more as it is presented to us than as it may in fact be, this is when certainty is bred. And if certainty is inauthenticity, then inauthenticity is a divorce from the self.
A simplified world leads to simplified conclusions. Maybe the absolutist declarations we are so accustomed to hearing make sense when applied to the world behind the screen, but that is not the real world. Likewise the religion that me and my peers were taught was not real religion. And therefore we declared – simply, without a second thought – that it was wholly false. A holy falsehood.
I’m reminded of a passage from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which also takes place on a frozen lake:
‘[Orlando] would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness and melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other; and draws from this conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied to madness… “All ends in death,” Orlando would say, sitting upright on the ice. But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them – Sasha stared at him, perhaps sneered at him, for he must have seemed a child to her, and said nothing… English was too frank, too candid, too honeyed a speech for Sasha. For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptuous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed. So the green flame seems hidden in the emerald, or the sun prisoned in a hill. The clearness was only outward; within was a wandering flame.’
Discovering literature was the beginning of my personal thawing, and my awakening to my own inner, wandering flame. ‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,’ said Kafka. But with Catholicism having already failed to take root, it was inevitably a more pantheistic path on which it set me. It made me want to be an explorer of all the regions of the human soul, whichever topographies and gods they contained. It seemed to me that each soulful mountain that I longed to climb might have atop its peak its own Zeus, Shiva, its own Ra, its own Yahweh, or it might have nothing… and so be it.
It could be that this spirit of exploration, and the aversion to certainty that goes with it, is a sign of my still relatively youthful sum of years. Maybe there will come a time when, like the father at the end of Dekalog I, I will feel the need to seek salvation on some particular shore. Just as he realised the computerised calculations by which he lived his life were a false certainty, completely insufficient to weather him through the death of his son, maybe there will come a time when exploration reveals itself to me as similarly deficient in the face of a new need. Maybe there is an older me that would look back on this and smile from some fixed sanctuary I have yet to find. But which of the two of us would be the wiser one? I’m not certain that either of us could say. Maybe certainty is simply another season through which lives must pass. And, as the great Bill Callahan asks, what comes after certainty?
‘My destiny is swerving in the road in front of me, drunkenly.
When you take responsibility for your own divinity
True love is not magic,
It’s certainty
And what comes after certainty.’
Three Colours: Blue, White and Red
Aesthetically, probably my favourite building in the world.
I remember the collective incredulity of a class of ten-year-olds when one teacher insisted that we should turn the other cheek always, in the face of any conflict, and under no circumstances did she believe that it would be preferable to defend ourselves.
I actually received the highest grade in my final religious studies exam.
We certainly wanted to believe in ghosts, if not God.
Robert Louis Stevenson
See my last post, The Human Animal, in which I explore Henri Bergson’s ideas on the essentially ambiguous state of the human being.