"All or Nothing is my call;
should you by the roadside fall,
then your life's been thrown away.
No concession to distress,
no reprieve for trespasses; --
and should life not bear the strain,
you must gladly die, no less."
"O, but I had failed to see
All or Nothing it must be.
Compromise's road I blundered; --
but today God spoke to me.
At this moment, o'er this house,
doom's shrill trumpet-blast has thundered; --
and I listened, tremulous, --
crushed, like David facing Nathan, --
battered, anguished-tossed, dismayed --;
all my doubts have now been laid.
The spirit of compromise is Satan!"
--Ibsen, Brand--
"All or Nothing." This is Brand's cry. And no-one could be more earnest in practicing what they preach than Brand. He gives up comfort, home, wife, child, community, and life itself in his ardor to give all. Yet he ends the play, in the closing act, succumbing beneath an avalanche, calling upwards to heaven, "Tell me, God, in death's abyss; -- / is no fleck of hoped-for bliss / earned by man's will, quantum satis --?" And the final line reads "A Voice (calls through the thunderous din): He is deus caritatis!" He is a God of Love. The stage-prompt is so trickily ambiguous. Whose voice is it? Is it the voice of God? Is it that of Brand's companion Gerd? Is it the voice of Brand himself? One way or the other, "He is a God of Love" is Ibsen's answer to the question, "how much is enough?" "He is a God of Love" is Ibsen's answer to Brand's overriding question of what it means to give all.
What sort of an answer is "He is a God of Love"? An answer that sent me grinning altitudinous, cheeks surging upwards to the temples in contentment. I closed the book, those disintegrating mid-century covers, stood up, turned to beam at A____, and absconded to the garden, to the Canadian March and the unthawed lake. Why did the answer make me so happy? Why was I so satisfied with it?
I desire to give all. I, like Brand, feel I must live to the tune of "All or Nothing." I, like Brand, cannot content myself with compromise. And I do recognize that this is potentially a very dangerous way to be. It is the sort of personality out of which monomanias are born. It is to be in attitudinal league with Ahab and Hamlet. Yet I know no way of throwing off this aspect of myself, and, more significantly, I would not throw it off even if I got the chance.
So. I live with a powder keg within myself. Willfully I live so. Why? Why would anyone take the risk of such internal intensity? Why would anyone embrace a philosophy of all or nothing? I can only answer that I have found no way to disentangle the things I most desire from the philosophy of all or nothing. As soon as I try to logically unhitch the things I most desire from this philosophy, they lose their desirability. I stop desiring love as soon as I stop seeing it as something that deserves my all. I stop desiring truth as soon as I start supposing truth might not be, in its deepest sense, absolute. I stop desiring life when I start to think I owe it anything less than everything. And the moment I came to believe that God could be sufficiently honored in half-measures would be the moment I came to disbelieve in God.
Am I to be Brand, then? Am I to give up all that he gave up in order to fulfill my commitment to "all or nothing"? No. No. That cannot be it. I would not have smiled so merrily at the closing of the book if that had been the conclusion. The conclusion was not that "all or nothing" requires complete surrender of all the things that render life dear. The conclusion was the opposite. "He is a God of Love." That was the conclusion. Brand misinterpreted what it meant to give all. He supposed giving all was synonymous with giving up all. Yet, in giving up all, he gave up every manifestation of love. In giving up all, he self-avowedly made "no concession to distress" and "no reprieve for trespasses," and thereby acted contrary to compassion, to mercy, to all of the principle tenets of Love; he acted contrary, indeed, to the very wording of the Lord's prayer.
And what of myself? It is so difficult to unbiasedly scrutinize oneself. Yet I think I have myself fallen into Brand's same rut of misinterpreting "all or nothing." I have not thought deeply enough. I have not thought bravely enough. I have not trusted enough. I have said to myself "obey," forgetting that Love's injunction is not to "obey" in and of itself, but to obey those commandments in which one has Faith or concerning which one has understanding (granted, one may object that I am here expressing a personal and not an orthodox Faith/theology, but my Faith/theology is personal; any attempt on my part to swallow an orthodox Faith/theology that went against my personal Faith /theology would be a pretense, a nothingness). If one obeys an edict that does not strike one's thought and Faith as wholly in line with Love, one is not obeying Love, but some other master (most likely, in my case, fear).
Light burst upon me yesterday morning. Lightness did. With an intensity I had forgotten for sadly many months, possibly even years, I recalled how very dearly I loved my friends. Such lightness. A great weight, carried unbeknownst for such a long while, left on the mattress with the insomnia that attended it.
