Brand (play)
He is a young idealist whose main purpose is to save the world, or at least people's souls, but his judgment of others is harsh and unfair.
Brand in the mountains confronts different kinds of people: a farmer traveling with his son, who does not dare to brave a glacier on behalf of his dying daughter; Einar, a young painter with an easy-going attitude, and his fiancée, Agnes; and finally, a fifteen-year-old girl, Gerd, who claims to know of a bigger church in the mountains and hunts for a great hawk.
He believes that people have become too sloppy about their sins and shortcomings, because of the dogma that Christ, through his sacrifice, cleansed humanity once and for all.
Nobody dares to venture the rough fjord, but Brand goes in a boat and, to his surprise, Agnes follows him.
In the end of the second act, we meet Brand's mother, and learn that he grew up under the glacier, in a dreary place with no sun.
Some years later, Brand and Agnes live together with their son, Alf, who is grievously ill because of the climate.
The bailiff is opposed to Brand, and tells him that he has growing support in the parish, explaining his own plans for building public institutions like a poorhouse, a jail and a political hall.
The bailiff reveals that Brand's mother was forced to break with her true love, and married an old miser instead.
After the bailiff leaves, a Roma woman arrives, demanding clothes for her freezing child (it is Christmas Eve).
Whereas Brand mourns the loss of his wife, Einar in the end thinks her death was righteous, because he regards her as a female seducer.
Brand protests against the heavy plight lain upon him by his elders, throws the key to the church into the fjord and makes for the mountain with the entire parish following him.
He urges the people to "lift their faith" and make a "Church without limits" that is meant to embrace all sides of life.
They are lured down to the valley again by the bailiff, who fakes news of great economic opportunity (a large quantity of fish in the sea).
The spirit says that the fall of man forever closed the gates to Paradise, but Brand states that the road of longing is still open.
At the end of the play, Gerd takes him to the glacier, her personal church, and Brand recoils when understanding where he is, the "Ice-cathedral".
Gerd, who has been hunting the hawk from the start of the play, fires a shot at it, and lets loose a great avalanche, which in the end buries the entire valley.
But when she chooses, Brand reminds her of the moral consequence of that choice – it is final, and there is no turning back.
The definition of wholeness as a greater good and fragmentarism as a bad thing, is a philosophical statement, originally derived from Plato and Pythagoras.
The sentence about a Christianity that embraces all sides of life, resembles the view of the Danish priest Grundtvig.
Throughout the play, we see that Brand looks for the right way to solve this problem, and makes new discoveries as he moves forward.
[1] Kierkegaard gave an essential place in his philosophy to the opposition between faith and reason, the importance of making decisive choices and suffering in the name of God, and whose life ended during an official attack he led against the church of his country (which he thought perverted the original Christian message, making it an empty religion).
Except for a few indications in Nietzsche, and in Stirner, and a few others, Ibsen alone seems to have grasped the principle of the Kantian ethics (notably in "Brand" and "Peer Gynt").
