School of Community

How to Reach
Certainty About Christ?
In this film, well worth seeing again, is documented the Protestant attitude described in the second chapter
of Why the Church?

Fr Giussani’s presentation of C.T. Dreyer’s film–original title Vredens Dag (Denmark 1943)–from the book “Le mie letture” in the collection “Books of the Christian spirit” published by BUR
The drama which the religious sense introduces into life becomes tragedy for the thinking man, capable of really reflecting on himself. This is the bitter, tremendous and grandiose message of the film Day of Wrath.
The first silence-filled sequences are interrupted by a phrase spoken by the witch, “Great is the power of evil”; this is the real title of the film. Great is the power of evil, which insinuates itself in the illusion that the individual heart is prone to, and which penetrates the normal tenor of the crowd immediately ready for violence against whatever doesn’t correspond to its own ideal image: in this case the witch. It even insinuates itself into the heart of the protestant pastor, who is the main role in the film. Moreover, all this did not prevent him, an old man, choosing a young girl as his wife. He didn’t consider the noose he was putting around her neck, the suffocating destiny he was forcing on her, and the price of this choice to make an exception to the rule. In fact, he should have condemned the girl’s mother who was a witch, but he didn’t, and in this he went against his conscience. Great is the power of evil, which first upsets and corrupts the youthful freshness of the young wife, which then invades the will and the feelings of the pastor’s son. The young wife, too, shows that she possesses the same evil spirit as her mother, the witch. The woman seen at the beginning is a friend of her mother, and while the mother escapes it she will be condemned to burn at the stake. She tells the pastor, “You have not condemned my friend; you made an exception in her case, why not for me?”
Great is the power of evil: and the young wife’s desire, full of this strange power, will cause the death of the pastor. Man can do nothing against evil. He can be angered to the point of reacting violently (burning witches, for example), but he achieves nothing. And the humiliation the Protestant pastor carries in his heart for the rest of his life, despite his words and his dignified role as the guide of his people, is a proof of this incapacity of man to resist evil. It is a documentation of what the Church’s tradition calls “original sin”. But Christ has come for this evil, God has come to free us from this evil. How? In the Protestant view, by placing hope in the hereafter, in a reality with no connection with the present. This is the only solace that can come to the thinking man who discovers the tragedy of evil in himself: hope in the hereafter, in the hereafter where there is mercy. Shortly before being committed to the flames, the witch turns to the pastor and says, “Free me, as you freed your wife’s mother!” And the pastor replies, “Courage, you will soon be free,” that is to say after the fire, in the hereafter. “But it is here and now that I want to live,” says the witch, rightly, humanly, but she gets no reply.
The high point of the film is the last sequence, when, after the pastor’s sudden death, his mother, the frowning watchdog of the just, accuses the pastor’s wife of her son’s death in front of everyone. She accuses her of being a witch like her mother. And the concluding message of the film is the expression on the face of the pastor’s young wife. With eyes full of tears she says, “My eyes are full of tears and no-one dries them.” Thus is explained the contradiction with the episode in the film in which she weeps on seeing the death of the witch burning at the stake, and the pastor’s son, on seeing her tears, says to her “I’ll dry them.” The substance of life, though, is not this: theirs is only a short lived illusory company. The meaning of life as it appears in this film is more exact in its final expression: “My eyes are full of tears and no-one dries them.”
A Christianity of this kind looms over this world, it only burdens us as a communication of moral laws, which exalt the sense of evil, but offer it no remedy.