• IBSEN COURSE •
Course Syllabus
Required Reading
Week I Material
Week II Material
Week III Material
Week IV Material
Week V Material
Week VI Material
Week VII Material
Week VIII Material
Week IX Material
Week X Material
Week XI Material
Week XII Material
Week XIII Material

WEEK IV: Lecture Notes to Brand

cf. To The Third Empire. pp130-63

Text of Brand from the Geoffry Hill version

BRAND

Brand, Peer Gynt and Emperor and Galilean, not written for the theatre, are plays in which he explores his ‘dramatic argument' in terms of Space (Nature; the Cosmos) and Time (History).    They are in dramatic form, but free of the constraints of theatrical demands.   At thirty seven, Ibsen still was a 'failure': bankrupt, rejected by his own country, with only one success in the theatre, the historical play The Pretenders.   He went into exile and was to remain abroad for most of his creative life.   He, his wife and young son lived in utmost poverty yet, like Brand, he remained dedicated to his mission to be an authentic artist: true to his own vocation.   Though not written for the stage   Brand and Peer Gynt have been successfully staged. If Ibsen had died after writing these three plays he would not be known much outside Scandinavia.   It was the 12-play Realist Cycle that created interest in Ibsen the poetic dramatist.

Ibsen's career can be seen in three stages:

   1. 1848-1863.   the plays from Catiline up to Love's Comedy and   The Pretenders. These are mostly plays on   

       Norwegian history and mythology.

   2. 1864 - 1875 the middle period: Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean,and the political comedy, The League of

       Youth.)

   3. 1877-1899 the Realist Cycle from   Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken.

BRAND and the tragedy of Vocation

     Ibsen's intended to ‘realize himself' through the authentic vocation of an adequate dramatic poet even if this meant poverty and exile not only for himself, but for his wife and child.   It is not accidental, therefore, that Brand, written at a time of crisis, is an existentialist tragedy of vocation, close to Ibsen's own situation at the time he was writing.   He was so financially destitute he could not afford postage to mail letters, could not afford new clothes as he and his family lived in cramped conditions in Italy, eating only the simplest meals. He accepted a standard of life many would find intolerable.   In 1871, he wrote to his intellectual companion, the Danish critic Georg Brandes:

     "What I recommend for you is a thoroughgoing, full-blooded egoism, which will force you for a time to regard yourself and your work as the only things of consequence in this world, and everything else as simply non-existent....There actually are moments when the whole history of the world reminds one of a sinking ship; the only thing to do is save yourself."

     The fascination with Ibsen's work, from now on, is how, like the careers of e.g. Richard Wagner, Paul Cezanne or James Joyce, it is a long pilgrimage of artistic self-determination, self-fulfillment, even self-salvation, outside the conventional categories of religion, society, or public approval.   This defiant, determined dedication to his vocation helps one understand why James Joyce so revered Ibsen. Brand marks the beginning of that phase of his career which was to make him the most discussed and vilified artist of his time.  

     Ibsen's volatile confrontation with the theatre of his time is one of the great ironies of cultural history. His identity as a dramatist seemed almost programmed to repudiate at every point the theatrical medium he was intellectually to dominate.    Although he was continually rejected and assailed by the public, reduced to poverty, in exile, he doggedly worked upon public hostility and the debased condition of the theatre of his time until he forged a modern drama for his own revolutionary artistic purposes and vision.    Even after the success of Brand in1866 he kept up his contentious stance towards the public.   

     At a time when a playwright was hardly more than a hack supplying ‘material' to be reshaped by the actor manager; or an opportunist reworking approved theatrical formulae, Ibsen, like his contemporary Richard Wagner in the opera, was determined the medium should be remade to conform to his artistic demands.    More than Wagner, Ibsen put the integrity of his art above all temptation to exploit a potentially very lucrative medium.

    In complete contrast to Ibsen's artistic agenda, Eugene Scribe's highly lucrative formula of the ‘well-made-play' insisted it was pointless to search for serious causes behind events.   Even the situations with the gravest consequences could be shown to be determined by the most trivial accidents. A glass of water spilled by a jealous woman could determine the fate of two nations. It was futile to look for deeper causes behind events, as philosophers like Hegel and Marx sought; or, like the revolutionaries, to attempt to change society.  

     This cynical doctrine was highly congenial to the powers that controlled society. Trivializing drama abetted in the agenda of the ruling classes who were determined to undo the results of the French Revolution.   The ‘triple alliance' of Austria, Russia and France, led by Metternich, imposed order upon Europe through a repressive system of spying, censorship, the suppression of dissent and the imprisonment of rebels.   The middle classes went along with this repressive program because it sustained a very rewarding economic order.   They happily acquiesced in the demand that society's entertainments be devoid of subversive thought.

     Ibsen, who started out with revolutionary sympathies, later became disenchanted with political activity.   “I shall never agree to making liberty synonymous with political liberty,” he wrote to Brandes:

    "...what I call the struggle for liberty is nothing but the constant, living assimilation of the idea of freedom.   He who possesses liberty otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead and soulless; for the idea of liberty has undoubtedly this characteristic, that it develops steadily during its assimilaltion.   So that a man who stops in the middle of the struggle and says” “Now I have it” – thereby shows he has lost it."

     This proclaims the existential conviction that living is the endless evolution of a quest for authenticity that must ceaselessly be tested, extended and maintained throughout a lifetime.   Ibsen said Brand could as well have been an artist as a priest, for both face the same challenge of unyielding integrity to their chosen vocation.   To realize his vocation as poet, Ibsen was willing to exile himself from his homeland, accepting poverty for his wife and son in bohemian Rome, risking the prospective fate of complete failure as the poet of his people.   Ibsen's attitude is summed up in the words of Brand (p. 42)

             I’ll let this world/
             go, self-enthralled.
             let it go its way/
             But if the enemy
             strikes at my work/
             Then I strike back!
             I pledge myself to that
             truth of the inmost word  (Geoffrey Hill's translation)

             Ibsen’s concept of his identity as an authentic poet/dramatist had to be asserted against the conventional world, in spite of that world.  His career, when one considers the odds against its success, is an impressive feat of self-determination.  Ibsen was born in a small provincial town, Skien, in a remote part of Europe - Norway - writing in a language spoken by only a small population on the outer edge of European civilization. He had no university education, leaving home and working full time from the age of fifteen as an apothecary’s apprentice in another little provincial town - much like Brand in his little community.  Unlike Brand however, Ibsen left Norway for a 30 year exile first to Rome, to that genial South that beckons to Brand and Agnes, only to be lost forever in Act II,.   He also went into a more profound internal exile.  In his imagination he inhabited a parallel world peopled by the ghosts and echoing with the events of the European past.  The interplay of this ghostly world with his own contemporary world is one of the most notable aspects of the Realist Cycle.  The inventor of modern realist drama chose to live among the antiquities of Rome as well as the new world order of Bismark’s Germany.

        The idea and shape of Brand as a drama came to Ibsen in a form of revelation while standing in St. Peter's, in Rome.  Until then, he had been struggling with a version of the story as an epic poem - which shows just how great a break with theater Ibsen was determined to make.  Though not written for performance, Brand in its final version is conceived as a play.  Reading it one 'enacts' it.    The play should be seen as a moving, peopled landscape, a landscape of the mind. . The closest work to it in spirit, I think, is Melville's Moby Dick, which similarly fuses spiritual allegory with realistic narrative.   We are meant to 'see' the action with a double vision: on one level, we have a parable of a quest for authenticity of spirit against a world that prefers "the spirit of compromise" symbolised by the hawk whose image recurs through the play.  To such fantastic figures as the hawk are added the Gypsies, Gerd, the Ice Church, the Choir of Invisibles, the spirit of Agnes in the last act, and so on, indicating an important supernatural dimension to the drama.  However, we also are meant to see the world of the playh as real, natural, subject to the laws of Nature: of snow and sunshine, storm and avalanche, all of which occur, though at symbolically 'right' times, as natural phenomena.  Gerd, for example, sets off the final avalanche with a rifle shot. Ibsen explores an actual world for its symbolic significance. 

           He creates a dramatic setting which can be symbolic without contradicting our experience of its reality - unlike most Symbolist drama. He insists it is in this world, the world we know from everyday experience, that spiritual dimensions are to be discovered.   The symbol does not exist on some other plane from everyday reality but is another dimension of that reality if we were ‘awakened’ to see it.  The actual world is waiting to be the site of revelation - in a series of ‘epiphanies’.  This real yet symbolic landscape is present all through the Realist Cycle also. Ibsen re-invented Norway as a space for his metaphoric imagination.   “ In this country, it is only the mountains that give an echo, not the people” Ibsen wrote in a note to When We Dead Awaken”and this condition, of a one-dimensional humanity with no awareness of its lost spiritual heritage is the ‘fallen’ condition that Brand is determined to combat.   The drama constructs and explores a natural scene adequate as a ‘world’ for a possibly adequate human identity.  This is a symbiosis of landscape and human spirit that we find so often in Romantic art.

The Metaphoric Landscape of  BRAND

                                                       
Main themes of BRAND

        Brand is a difficult play to "get into" but, with Emperor and Galilean, it best helps us see the scale of Ibsen’s imagination.   It is typical of its century.  Nineteenth century Europe was groping for a new spiritual direction.  It was the age of spiritualism, of fascination with the occult, of spiritualist gurus and mediums.  Poets like W.B. Yeats - as well as Strindberg and even Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes - dabbled in the occult, in mysticism. These were all ways of escaping, or evading, the dispiriting materialism at the core of modern culture.  The traditional Church and its teaching no longer commanded the respect of many intellectuals.In Brand's view, itt had degenerated from the religion of a rebel, Jesus, and his band of outcasts proclaiming their kingdom was not of this world, into a well-organized, established and wealthy institution content to give its support to the powers of a corrupt and materialist society. 

      Nietzsche famously pronounced God was dead: Brand long before Nietzsche, more or less says the same thing to Einar in Act One: that he has come to bury the traditional God and will remake God into the more terrifying God of Job or Abraham..  Writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky tried to formulate a new Christianity to meet the needs of the time.   Søren Kierkegaard attacked established ‘Christendom’ and insisted the Christian life was an “all or nothing” commitment to the demands of Christ.  There is much of Kierkegaard in the character of Brand.

     Brand sees his age as creating a docile population of spiritual slaves, content to conform to hideously alienated reality - "sheep" as the Mayor approvingly calls them.  'Humane' people like the Mayor and the Doctor who alleviate the ills of such a society actually are preserving its mediocrity, - as the Mayor admits.  Brand, as priest, has to assert the absolute primacy of the spirit over the body, of salvation over material life.  He cannot compromise for a moment, for once he gives in, he has conceded power to the Mayor and the material world.  Brand is not sure he is a Christian. Like Kierkegaard, he wants to be faithful to the fierce, uncompromising Christianity of the first Christians not the kindly, ineffectual God of the modern Church . He must make his life a 'witness' to this uncompromising God at whatever the cost.. 

     If Brand seems an extremist, it was perhaps because extremists were needed to awaken and shock the world into spiritual life.  For Kierkegaard modern Christendom had lost all sight of who the original Jesus was: rebel, outcast and friend of publicans and sinners, a criminal executed by conventional society l.  As in Dostoevsky's Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, the organized Church would be the first to condemn Jesus if he re-appeared in life.

      It is not likely Ibsen himself thought the same way as Brand.  Rather, he is testing the consequences of the ‘Brand-Kierkegaardian commitment’ in the modern world. (He called the play a ‘syllogism’)  It is as if he is taking up the Christian identity and testing what would happen if one tried genuinely to live according to its spirit. For Brand to waver for a moment, to be kindly like the Doctor or practical like the Mayor would be to compromise the identity of the Christian apostle to the world, to hand on a compromised version of the apostle-identity.  It is perfectly appropriate to the vocation of the Doctor to alleviate pain and bring comfort: it is perfectly appropriate for the vocation of the Mayor as public official to be shrewd and practical to further prosperity and maintain political control over the people.

     But the Kierkegaardian priest, like the poet, must stand by an uncompromising version of his/her identity, not to qualify it it any way, if it was to be established as essential to the world.  Brand's quest for authenticity, of being an unswerving witness to God, will lead to the destruction of his family: first his son, then his wife.  Finally, he dies, without friends, without love, beneath the ice-church, the icy structure that has been hovering over the entire scene of the play and which, like the white whale in Moby Dick, seems the unconscious goal and nemesis of Brand's solitary quest.  

     The play does not claim Brand is right or wrong: it presents the tragedy of choosing a demanding identity through vocation and then sustaining it against all temptations to compromise. Ibsen redefines heroism and the tragic drama for the modern theatre:  in which a peasant's son can attain the stature of a classic tragic hero.  Peer Gynt, the peasant anti-hero of the next play, is deliberately created by Ibsen as the polar opposite of Brand.   Here, Ibsen explores the consequences of not making the Brand commitment.  We follow Peer's dizzy and exotic career of sexual and worldly triumphs until that career ends in the condition of terrifying non-identity - of never having been an authentic 'self'.  This is the Existentialist aspect of these two plays. Beginning with Brand Ibsen creates a new theatrical mythology of tragic identity in which dramatic action, character and scene take on a form of universal ‘fate’ available to each and every modern man and woman. 

    A tragic and heroic drama now can be that of a peasant's son (Brand) or a bourgeois housewife (Nora Helmer; Mrs. Alving); or the humble ‘insulted and injured’ family in the impoverished attic-flat of the The Wild Duck.    Brand asks the same question as that asked by Kierkegaard:  is the Christian demand of ‘All or Nothing’ livable within the modern world. Ibsen does not present Brand as an ideal human being:  Peer Gynt dramatizes other aspects of humanity unexplored by Brand that we must not lose sight of: "joy of life", an appetite for living, for keenly feeling the beauty of life and of the world. 

    Brand and Peer Gynt each contains just those qualities the other woefully lacks.  Both end tragically.  Peer opportunistically exploits his human energies: sexual, imaginative, playful, but totally lacks the integrity and authenticity of Brand   He lies, fantasizes, plays any role he is offered or that he happens upon.  He ends us with no authentic core of identity at all: but, more than Brand he is good dramatic company. Peer roams the world, Brand  stays in one place.  Peer runs away from any real challenge; Brand stands his ground and suffers.  With Peer, we are impressed by his exuberant energies even though he totally wastes them.  With Brand, we are impressed, even if uncomfortably, by his unyielding authenticity.

     The Brand type appears again and again in human history: the many martyrs, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim: martyrs of rationalism like Giordano Bruna; or of faith, like Savanarola of renascence Florence; both burned at the stake for commitment to truth denounced as heresy.   Such individuals shake up a culture and often makes the rest of us feel guiltily inauthentic. Ibsen notes the uncongenial aspects of his hero: he confronts Brand with various opposing voices and often gives them very good arguments against him.

The Triple alliance:

        At the end of Act one, Brand encounters the demented Gypsy girl, Gerd, whose God is the god of the Ice Church; an inhuman, pure abstraction of the divine that has no human attributes. The Ice Church broods over the whole drama and will be Brand’s ultimate destination.  This is the realm of a god without mercy, somewhat like the Janensist or Calvinist god of implacable predestination.    It is the terrible, logical embodiment of Brand’s own quest as he rejects, one after the other, the compromises implored by his fellow humans.  The fatal defect of Gerd’s fanatic idea of the divine, as Brand sees at this stage, is that, unlike his’ own tragic path, it is arrived at too immediately, not mediated by the human experience of joy and suffering, by love, in fact.  Gerd can inhabit only the bleak heights beyond human society.  Brand names the ‘Triple Alliance’ he sees as his Adversary. 

• The Valley Dwellers: the majority occupied with their material welfare and controlled by the officials of State and Church
• The aesthetic mentality, happy to escape from unhappy reality into anodyne art and pleasure (Einar and his ‘comfortable’ idea of God)
• The fanatic ideologues, sacrificing complex humanity for their 'absolute' ‘creeds (Gerd and the Ice Church).

(a)  The Valley Dwellers

             These are the mass of people, too concerned with with day to day survival. This is the audience/congregation that must be addressed, must be encouraged to awaken to spiritual truth and freedom. We meet such Valley Dwellers again in Peer Gynt.    Here, they are controlled, comforted and corrupted by such 'good' people as the Mayor, Doctor, Dean, Schoolmaster -  all of whom have sold out to the world and its powers.  The Doctor, especially, and even the Mayor, are 'sympathetic' - the Doctor for his selfless tending of Brand’s mother, the Mayor for his dedication to the material interests of his 'flock'.  The genial Mayor represents all political and worldly authority, both sinister and benevolent, that stands in the way of one’s spiritual evolution..  The Dean (the Church) is similar.   Behind him is organized, ‘Christendom’ making sure the spirit remains tamed and coerced into social convention.  Through these representatives of our familiar world, Ibsen is able to locate huge political/religious themes within his little, modern, northern fishing town. Brand at first wishes to escape these Valley dwellers and go south, to conquer the wider world and ‘realize’ his vocation in the most creative terms: however, both the villagers’ reproach that he is deserting them after lighting the flame of spirit in them and the appearance of his mother, with all the guilt he has inherited from her, force him to remain in the valley and fight his fight through all this obscurity - the condition of his tragedy. Ibsen probably is imagining what his own circumstance would have been if he had remained in Norway and fought sought to realize his own poetic vocation there.

(b) The aesthetic mentality

       An alternative to Brand’s mission is supplied by the poet, Einar who claims to be pursuing a 'higher' vocation, Art; but this aesthetic idea of Truth as Beauty cannot deal with reality, with suffering and death.  In the epic poem Brand, Einar was given much greater importance. Aestheticism, interpreting the world through effective and pleasing works of art, is the greatest temptation to the poet, to Ibsen himself. The Aesthetic Movement's creed, 'Art for Art’s Sake’ was a temptation Ibsen had confronted.  In 1865, he wrote to his fellow poet Bjørnson:

             If I were to name.the most important result of my coming here, [Rome] I should
             say that it was that I have rid myself of that aesthetic attitude, that forcing oneself
             into isolation and self-sufficiency that formerly held sway over me.  Aestheticism
             in this sense now seems to me as great a curse as theology is to religion.

             As an artist, he had to be on guard against aestheticism.  For aestheticism reconciles humanity to its alienated condition and can render untruth attractive  Thus, Einar's 'God" is undemanding, harmless, kindly, removed from life's serious issues and sets up no challenge to the way of the world. This is the God that many artists depict, either the Babe on the Madonna's breast, or a kindly, senile figure, such as you find in church buildings.  Brand's alternative is more like Michelangelo's Christ in the Sistine Chapel, sending the damned to Hell.  Aestheticism does not allow art to take in the ugly, the subversive, the terrifying.  It can explore neither the abyssal depths nor the true heights of the human condition.

(c) The fanatic ideologues:  Gerd

     Gerd symbolizes the third member of the ‘triple alliance’. Certainties founded on `religious or ideological fanaticism are yet another way of evading complex and painful reality. Here, the subjective conviction that one possesses the true faith, and is ‘saved’, without having to put this faith to the test of one’s full humanity. This immediate self-certainty of serving the truth contrasts with the agony, tormented love and suffering Brand will undergo .  It is another trap for the human spirit and one that Brand must particularly beware.  Fanaticism claims to arrive immediately at the goal of faith (that one possesses the Truth) without the human pain and labor of getting there.  In Ibsen’s day all kinds of ‘spiritualist’ and evangelist movements claimed to offer immediate access to salvation along with other ideologies whose disciples claimed revelation.   Later in the play Einar’s superficial aestheticism will convert to fanaticism, showing a frighteningly callous indifference to human suffering and a repellant self-conviction that contrasts with Brand’s own, agonizing, self-doubting and anguished ascent to the bleak terrain of the Ice Church.  Einar’s is a ‘faith’ that does not confront tragic reality;  unlike Brand’s doubting faith which does.  Brand’s suffering ‘validates’ his quest even if Ibsen may not endorse it.  

     Aestheticism and fanaticism equally share the fault of simplifying human experience; something the authentic and adequate poet and artist must resist.  In Brand, Ibsen put his own vocation as poet to the severest test.  In Ibsen’s lifetime his hometown, Skien, had undergone a conversion to a form of uncompromising Christian fundamentalism through a talented priest, Gustav Adolph Lammers. . Members of Ibsen's own family were among the converts.  Lammers, like Brand, broke with the established Church, was denounced as a heretic, closed his church and led a breakaway congregation.  In much of his preaching he attacked the ‘spirit of compromise’ as the manifestation of Satan.  In Lammers, Ibsen seemed to have found much that he drew upon for the character of Brand.

        Slothful compromise, aestheticism, fanaticism are temptations luring the human congregation onto treacherous paths.    Below these, and even more appalling, is the subhuman world waiting to utterly debase humanity. This is the ‘troll undeworld’ that we will meet again in Peer Gynt.  In Gerd's speech in Act III (pp. 92-93) they are like a horror-movie’s Living Dead, rising from the underworld, “the undead, thronging the mountainside” who are taken into the human community even to feed off the breasts of the women.  What are the trolls?  They have been called humanoids without human characteristics: ourselves if we gave up the struggle to be fully human.  They represent a recidivism to a subhumanity that can overwhelm individuals or whole nations;  leading to the debasement of our world: destroying its natural and its spiritual  values and possibilities.  In one passage Brand envisages a sub-humanity, “where men move like shadowy ghosts” inhabiting an industrial-capitalist Hell like industrial Britain..   Here, humans become dwarfs serving human greed, mining underground or slaving above amidst industrial filth.

             A nation smug amid the gloom
             Savors its penitential psalm:
             Not for us His cup was drained,
             Not for us the kiss that burned,
             Not for us the thorny crown
             Rooted in His blood that ran.
             Not for us, O not for us
             To seek salvation at His Cross.
             For us, only the whip that rakes
             Fresh scars across our spineless backs.(Geoffrey Hill tr.)

In this troll world, faith is debased into a servile acceptance that also stifles the spirit of revolution.

The most terrible of BRAND’s tempters
The worst tempter is the Doctor, whose genuine good nature forces Brand to see the cost of his mission to his own family: his Mother, Son and Wife.  Here is where his struggle is the most agonized, and it is where the reader or playgoer’s own acceptance of Brand is put to the hardest test.  Ibsen’s own decision to break totally with his own family from the age of fifteen, and later to go into exile with his wife and son and to subject them to share in his poverty as he struggled, like Brand, to realize his vocation against a hostile world, invested the plot of Brand with personal significance.  The two quests, the dramatist’s and his hero’s, were similar.

THE PLAY: ACT BY ACT

Act I

Scene: Northwestern Norway:  A desolate area.
"High up in the wilds of the mountains".  Mist and rain.  

     Brand's first movement will be a Moses-like descent to the little town in the north. And later he will return to the heights from which he descended.  The various levels of this vertical landscape, from sea depths (trolls) to Ice Church will be stages, too, of his spiritual drama.  It is a mental and metaphysical landscape as well as a natural one   We need to  'see' or 'read' all Ibsen's drama, from now on as simultaneously literal and symbolic where one without the other would be inadequate.

         In Act Onefor instance, Brand crosses a treacherous glacier to bring Christian comfort to a dying girl.  His determination is contrasted with the terror and pusillanimity of the peasant father and his son, the Valley Dwellers.  They insist that the Bible's New Testament belongs to a past that is dead.  Brand insists that with Faith and Will one can repeat the actions of Christ in the world.  He faces up to danger, knowing it, but determined to overcome it.    This danger is both allegorical and 'real'.   Soon after, the mist clears and Einar and Agnes appear, in the sunshine, dancing perilously near an abyss and, unlike Brand, unaware of the danger they are in.  (They will appear later as Torvald and Nora of A Doll House who, In Act III., similarly dance above an abyss).  They believe they can avoid tragic conflict and turn life into one long game, like the "squirrels" and "songbirds' of A Doll House.  In Brand we can 'see' the 'symbolic' meaning more easily than in A Doll House but the meaning is the same.  For a reader’s theater, Ibsen needs to 'show' what would not work on stage.  On stage, “dancing on the edge of a precipice” would not convey symbolic meaning but would be just a presentation of a physical danger.  In the Realist Cycle, he will establish the metaphor or symbol by different, subtler, theatrical means.

         Brand's quarrel with Einar is that Einar's art 'debases' the idea of God by making it pleasant, innocuous, a blasphemy worse than sin or atheism. Brand, instead, wants to restore the terrifying, heroic idea of the human spirit. After the encounter with Brand, Einar and Agnes find the sun has gone in, and it suddenly has become cold.  Brand’s harsh account of reality has chilled the glow of their aesthetic dream. They leave dejectedly, and Brand then recalls his home and its spiritual meanness. At this point the third member of the triple alliance appears, Gerd to complete this stage of the syllogism, and Brand reflects on the triple alliance that has corrupted the world and that will be the object of his future battle.   Presumably, Brand now proceeds to the dying girl but Ibsen has lost interest in this motivating detail after it has served its symbolic function. This first act is a good example of the dual nature of Ibsen's simultaneously realist/symbolist texts.  The events happen to ‘real people’ in a ‘real landscape’ but the people, landscape and events are there also because of their metaphoric value. 

ACT II

Scene. Below, at sea level: the 'fallen' township, to which BRAND descends. The stormy fjord.
Characters:  The Mayor, Doctor, the Provost, etc: These make up the benevolent  bureaucracy of the world, the leaders of the first level of the triple alliance.  They are well meaning, kindly, philanthropic: but deadly to the spirit because they encourage a diminished idea of humanity: one that keeps it non-rebellious, renouncing its potential human birthright.  In this Act, Brand, as priest, has to reject the people's clamor for material welfare: he has to insist on the primacy of the spirit's needs.  Priesthood is his chosen vocation and so he will not compromise his identity as a priest, insisting on the spirit’s primacy over the body.  Brand comes off as intransigently, unsympathetically harsh in this scene as he belittles the physical suffering of the people.  The Mayor by contrast, is more 'humane' and sensible. But  then comes an urgent and harrowing spiritual crisis: the parishioner who has murdered his child and has tried to commit suicide from remorse. This is a crisis (damnation) worse than hunger and it confronts Brand with the challenge to bear witness to his priest-identity by action: to risk his life to bring priestly absolution to the dying murderer.  You have to buy into the Christian mind-set to see the situation in these terms: but that is the premise the ‘syllogism’ the play assumes. At this moment he is joined by Agnes who irrevocably leaves Einar, and is won over by Brand's heroic commitment to his calling..

             After 'shriving' the dying man, Brand muses on the curse of heritage: the theme of the persistence of the past within the present..   In a secular version of Original Sin, each one of us is born with the guilt of the species within us and each must make his/her own peace with this heritage. The Villagers now confront Brand with his first agonizing challenge.   His desire is to go out into the wider world where his fulfillment as a spiritual leader lies.  As priest, however, it would be a betrayal of his vocation if he turned his back on the villagers just as he has 'awakened' them to possible spiritual liberation.  But to stay in this narrow community would deny Brand’s potential identity within a more brilliant world. His 'calling' demands the greater world to expand in.  But his calling also must respond to the needs of the people he briefly challenged and awakened.  Agnes, in a 'vision' sees a new world of the warm South, awaiting them but this idea of the future is blasted by the past. - the arrival of Brand's mother - and the guilt of his heritage.  Remembering this guilt, which paid for his education into his priest identity, he decides this is a debt he must repay to the blighted community. To evade it would vitiate his entire future.  Agnes joins Brand in his quest for authentic priesthood.

ACT III

Scene:  Three years later: the parsonage, in a shadowed and bleak valley. The parsonage will be the scene of Brand's greatest tragedy.  It is a cold place with almost total lack of sunshine, resembling the bleak nature of Brand's commitment.  Here is where he will be tested; to live up to the demand he preaches of all or nothing and require that demond of his mother, son and wife.  Hanging over the scene is the glacier (the Ice Church)   The demand of All or Nothing is the insistence on an absolute integrity.  The Christian truth can be validated in the world only if it is lived up to absolutely. (This was Kierkegaard's’ insistence).  It is the fundamentalist logic all faiths can be driven to.   If the demands of the faith are compromised, even from the best of motives, you have conceded some other value is more important than your faith.  This usually is conceded, wisely, by the world;  but it cannot be conceded by a witness to the faith. On such absolute commitment the survival of the faith in its integrity depends.  By choosing integrity to the vocation of priest Brand has chosen the path of tragedy. Faith ultimately requires martyrdom.

        In the course of the play Brand is brought up against the more normal and conventional human responses to the human crisis situations: Agnes; the kindly messengers; the Doctor; the Mayor all supply a more congenial human language than Brand, as witness to faith, can permit himself. The Doctor’s good will, common-sense and compassion reveal Brand’s ‘inhuman’ inflexibility;  however, for a Doctor, these good qualities are part of his vocation.  Brand's vocation - his fidelity to his idea of God cannot permit such flexibility.  He must insist on the strictest conditions for redemption.  If he is to save souls he must insist they meet this standard. 

             Søren Kierkegaard, as disconcertingly, similarly insisted on the most rigorous form of Christianity, and fiercely attacked 'Christendom' - the Church and its official clergy.  The Doctor and the Mayor are good, decent, 'humane' men of the world; however, they do not want a truly Christian priest in their community, any more than they would tolerate the return of Christ.  Ibsen’s argument, here, resembles Dostoevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.  Ibsen follows through the logic of his syllogism, and, like Dostoevsky’s  it is not a comfortable logic.  The conventional world should be disturbed, shaken, for that is what Christianity is supposed to do.  By following through the logic of the Christian challenge, Brand forces us to face up to its validity.  Brand's parishioners are depicted as spiritually vulnerable, liable to backslide into darkness if he leaves the community.  Brand's logic is discomfiting, but Ibsen at least shows him humanly suffering and tormented.   It is not only the validity of Christianity that is at stake.  In this act, the Mayor complacently admits his people use the heroic (Viking and pagan) past, too, as a celebrations of unchallenging sentimentality. 

             The major crisis in this Act is the choice Brand faces whether or not to perform the last rites for his mother.  Unless she can surrender all her guilty wealth, for which she sacrificed the possibility of love, Brand refuses to visit her.  His chief opponent is the Doctor who attacks him for not bringing his mother this last comfort.  (There will be a contrasting scene in Peer Gynt between the son and the dying mother).  When the Doctor finally returns with the news of the mother’s death Brand is now  put to his most severe test, over the threat to his child's life.   At this point, first one of his parishioners, then Gerd tell him what the consequences of his leaving the community will be. Gerd implies Brand alone stands between the flock and their relapse into a terrifying recidivism to a subhuman level.  Of course, in strict realism, Brand could remain and send his wife and son to a better climate.  But the logic of the ‘syllogism’ requires this further turn of the screw.

ACT IV  - Death of Agnes after loss of Alf.

       The building plans of the Mayor and of Brand.  The Mayor wants to build a poorhouse, gaol and festive hall, providing the community with a better material life.  Brand wishes to build a larger church representing a more adequate  spiritual life.  The Mayor tells Brand the odd story of Gerd’s parentage’ of the young and brilliant scholar who was rebuffed by Brand’s mother who made a loveless marriage with a wealthy older man. The young scholar then took to the outlaw life with the Gypsies and fathered Gerd..  This tortuous link of Gerd with Brand would make sense if Brand is the illegitimate son of the brilliant young scholar: this is implied but not established in the text,.It would anticipate the relationship of Gregers Werle and Hedvig in The Wild Duck a play that draws images and themes from Brand.

       After the Mayor leaves there follows what, in the theater, was the most famous scene in the play; an actress's natural favorite, allowing her to express the full pathos of the role of Agnes who, in this scene, brings in the one source of light. It is Christmas Eve, and Agnes lights the Christmas candles while her dead son, Alf, lies buried outside under the snow. Agnes, who fights back her own tears, wipes the streaming window panes, likening the moisture to tears shed by the house and which prevent the child from looking in and sharing the warmth and light of the room.  The scene is a good indication of the complexity and depth of Ibsen’s dramatic poetry. The Christmas candles derive from pagan winter festivals, signaling Agnes’s essentially ‘pagan’ nature . Her ‘idolatrous’ refusal to accept the finality of Alf’s death, so that she imagines Alf, in the grave watching the house and seeking to return to it; and the notion that the house itself is‘weeping’ at the separation, belong to pagan rather than Christian thought.  The warmth inside clashing with the cold outdoors creates the condensation that makes the windows ‘weep’: and this implies a contrast between the warmth of Agnes’ love and Alf's cold removal from that love that she imagines he suffers and Brand enforces.  She steels herself not to weep but displaces this action onto the house and wipes away the window’s 'tears' so that the child might be able to look within.  The grave outside now becomes clearer (the house ‘sees’ better, too) and light is thrown from the house across the grave like an embrace: an embrace that Brand ends by closing the window’s shutters.  What is most notable is that Ibsen, here, finds his deepest theatrical poetry where the dialectic is most intense.  From this point, Brand will be led to the very heart of loss.

ACT V “A feast of liars celebrating lies”"

       Agnes is recently dead, the new church has been built, and the community gathers in celebration. The new church is a new concept of God that Brand already has outgrown .  No human architecture can enclose his God-concept - Brand is being lured towards the inhuman Ice Church of Gerd.  As he watches the commemoration of the Church he sees a ‘liars’ feast; another occasion where the human congregation gathers to flatter itself by invoking the values, principles, and forebears (e.g. the Founding Fathers) that its actual way of life dishonors.

        Einar suddenly re-appears with a new-found  'faith' that is a caricature of Brand’s .This fanatic conviction of 'salvation' represents a self-deceiving certitude that comes without without suffering, without the agonized journey, filled with tragic human experience, that Brand has undergone.  Above all,  Einar’s faith has never encountered the agonizing, humanizing doubts that Brand ceaselessly has struggled with.   Brand throws away the keys to the new Church and leads his congregation away from the town, into the mountains.  This not as far-fetched as it sounds as it is close to what Lammers did to the folk of Skien, leading his followers out of the town to found a new community.. The same impulse drove many Europeans to found communities in America, like Ole Bull's Oleanna or John Bright and his followers' trek to Utah.

The trek to the Ice Church is the bleak conclusion to Brand’s long quest.  Does it invalidate that quest?  He has never been a fanatic like Gerd or Einar. The Ice Church is, rather, the tragic and inhuman height to which Brand honorably is drawn.  Brand tests the Kierkegaardian postulate, All or Nothing, and perhaps invalidated it as a human possibility.  The crowd turns against and deserts him, preferring the materialist lie of the Mayor.

The Last Temptation of BRAND.

        Voices and the figure of Agnes urge Brand renounce his quest of All or Nothing and find 'peace.' But Brand chooses to persist on this agonized path "freely and awake"  i.e. without illusion or compulsion.   Gerd then tempts him with her idolatry.  Brand weeps for the first time.  Does this mean he has found a level of 'humanity' that had eluded him?   He dies still uncertain of the path to redemption.  Yet this does not condemn his effort. Kierkegaard describes the agonizingly ‘absurd’ vocation of the apostle of a God who does not need to reward his servant:

             Though you were to knock but it was not opened unto you, though you
             were to seek but you did not find, though you were to labor but acquired
             nothing, though you were to plant and water but saw no blessing, though
             heaven were to remain closed and the witness fail to appear, your are joyful
             in your work nevertheless; though the punishment which the iniquity of the
             fathers had called down were to fall on you, you are joyful nevertheless,
             for against God we are always in the wrong.