Two Priests in "Babette's Feast": Lorens Loewenhielm

This is the second of a two-parter on the priestly roles played in the 1987 Danish movie, Babette’s Feast. In a previous post, I looked at how this role is played out by the movie’s titular character, Babette Hersant.

In many ways, Babette is the natural focus of any analysis of the movie. In this viewing, however, my attention was especially drawn to a different character, General Lorens Loewenhielm.

By way of background, Loewenhielm was a Swedish soldier who, 49 years before, fell in love with a younger version of Martine, one of the now matriarchs of a dwindling Lutheran congregation in Denmark’s Jutland. Martine’s Father, rather hypocritically, spurns marriage in general. However, loyalty to her father leads Martine to reject Lorens. The latter, heartbroken, decides to dedicate his attention to feed the only thing he has left in his life, his career. With sheer will, he advances up to the rank of general, enjoying worldly success with the world’s rich and powerful.

Almost 50 years later, Lorens receives an invitation to attend a dinner hosted by Martine and her sister - with the sumptuous meal prepared by Babette. With liturgical solemnity, the dishes are carried out and served to the guests. What intrigued me here was the fact that as each dish or wine is served, Lorens starts to name it with an abundance of delight and eloquence. By contrast, the members of the congregation (at least at first), try to plaster over the self-evident glory of the food with pious platitudes. In this instance, religion was used in the way Nietzsche and Marx conceived of religion, as a way to deflect attention from what was in front of them. Lorens, meanwhile, seems to be the only one recognising the reality of right before his nose.

This for me was the centrepiece of this particular viewing of Babette’s Feast, because earlier that afternoon, I had read a passage from Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World that touched on the very topic of naming things. Often, we associate the act of naming with the function of designation, the distinguishing of one thing from another. The name thus is an instrument to extend our control of the world.

By contrast, with reference to the book of Genesis, Schmemann associates the task of naming with one man, Adam. Schmemann gives a liturgical significance to Adam’s (and our) task for naming. Naming does not simply designate. Instead, Schmemann says, naming

revels the very essence of a thing, or rather its essence as God’s gift. To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and function within the cosmos created by God (15).

To name as Adam named, Schmemann says, changes the existential posture of the human person. To name in this Adamic fashion, and to recognise the divine source of earthly things as Adam did, means that, in Schmemann’s words

…the only natural (and not supernatural) reaction of man, to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, is to bless God in return, to thank Him, to see the world as God sees it and - in this act of gratitude and adoration - to know, name and possess the world. All rational, spiritual and another qualities of man…have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God…

In the context of liturgy, this is the exact nature of the priestly role, instantiated in the sacramental priesthood, but also mediated through the priest to all the faithful. This is why Lorens, though not a priest himself, is able to not only fulfil this act of naming, but move from naming things to praising God (as manifested in his iconic toast of thanks).

The task of naming is a moment of conversion for Lorens, who changes from a person who seizes control of his days with his ambition, to a person who, in a final farewell to Martine, gratefully articulates his days as time that is granted to him from above. Having recognised the richness of things and the greater richness of their divine source, he is able articulate his last words in his role in the movie: In this wonderful world, everything is possible.

Postscript: Fr Peter Hunter of the English Province of the Order of Preachers has a wonderful homily on the movie, which you can access here.

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