The Art of Grace

As an artist, Isak Dinesen (also known as Karen Blixen) struggled with seeing beauty as a sign of God and fearing that it was a distraction from God. This struggle led her into a crisis of faith that she resolved through writing her acclaimed novella stating: “When I wrote Babette’s Feast, I knew for the first time that God had forgiven me for loving the world.” I want to unpack this statement because it’s an astonishing confession — it shows how deeply personal and spiritual the story was for her.

Danish authour Isak Dinesen, also known as Karen Blixen

As a child at the turn of the 20^th century, she was raised in the tradition of Denmark’s established state religion, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, which aligned its theology since 1536 with Martin Luther, who initiated the Protestant Reformation by challenging Roman Catholic teachings in 1517. But, as a young adult, she longed for freedom and travelled Europe, married, and settled in Kenya to manage a large coffee plantation. Her life there was dramatized in the Academy Award winning Best Picture Out of Africa (1986), which showed the fecklessness of her husband, her challenges in managing the farm during the hostilities of WW1, the deterioration of her personal health, the financial insolvency of the plantation, and the tragic ending of a love affair.

She returned to her family’s Denmark estate at age 36, grief-stricken, disillusioned, and ill, where she lived out the rest of her life as a prolific storyteller. At about age 67, as she reflected on her soul torn between sin and freedom, she finished writing Babette’s Feast, which was published in 1958, just four years before her death at age 77.

“When I wrote Babette's Feast, I knew for the first time that God had forgiven me for loving the world.”

Babette’s Feast is an imaginative exploration of the intersection between art, faith, and grace. It features two sisters, Martine and Philippa, in the remote 19th-century Norwegian village of Berlevaag. They lead a rigid life centered around their father, the local minister, and their church. Both had opportunities to leave the village: one might have married Lorens Lowenhielm, a young army officer, and the other could have left with Achille Papin, a French opera singer. Through the relationships between the two sisters and their respective suitors, Dinesen brilliantly depicts how sin and pride operate as obstacles to perceiving and receiving grace--not only robbing the two couples of fruitful marriages but creating a spiritual barrenness in their futures.

Paris, France

Both suitors return to Paris to live out their lives while the sisters spend their lives caring for their father until he passes away and they continue his ministry. Many years later, they take in a French refugee, Babette Hersant, who agrees to work as their servant. After winning the lottery, Babette wants to repay the sisters for their kindness and offers to cook a French meal for them and 10 guests on the 100th anniversary of their father's birth. 

Babette becomes a Christ-like figure who sacrifices all she has and all she is to serve others for the purpose of giving the sisters and guests “one hour of the millennium.” 

This feast is the literary mechanism by which Dinesen resolves her crisis of faith: how can grace co-exist with beauty, freedom, and joy?  The traditional Lutheran piety in which she was raised stressed the danger of pleasure, art, and the senses as worldly distractions. Before the feast, we see characters and events that show how pleasure can become lust or gluttony; how art can become vanity or idolatry; how the senses can become distractions from faith when they seek satisfaction apart from God.  

But Luther himself delighted in good food, music, and laughter. Rather than a theology of suspicion, Dinesen uses her story to develop a theology of wonder: to explore how art can cooperate with grace to reflect God’s image; how art can help perceive grace within creation and the human spirit; to see art and the body and the senses not as distractions but as vessels of grace.

Babette organizes her feast according to a typical church liturgy, with a call to worship, hymns of adoration and thanksgiving, a sermon, a confession of sin, an assurance of pardon, the eating of bread and wine, after which there is a transformation in the inner lives of the guests as they reconcile long-suffering insults and injuries, and ends with a benediction. The guests not only enjoy an exquisite meal but experience transcendent love and re-enter the world with a profound faith rooted in a new experience of grace, one that was delivered through the senses, through Babette’s exquisite art.

Dinesen uses her story to develop a theology of wonder: to explore how art can cooperate with grace to reflect God’s image...

What is grace?  In Christian theology, grace is the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Babette becomes a Christ-like figure who sacrifices all she has and all she is to serve others for the purpose of giving the sisters and guests “one hour of the millennium.” In Christian theology, the millennium refers to the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, a period of perfect peace, justice, and divine harmony when evil is bound and the faithful live in blessed communion with God.  

In particular, what deepens my appreciation of grace, is the reunion of the sister Martine with her suitor Loewenhielm, now an old but esteemed General in Paris. While dressing for dinner, he reflects in a mirror on how his youthful sin immobilized his ability to surrender his heart to Martine. After leaving her in Berlevaag, he succeeded in turning his life around and becoming a “good” man…but now bewails the emptiness of his immortal soul.  During dinner, the sight of Martine and the sensual delights of the meal open his heart to infinite grace and he communicates to all the guests--but especially to Martine--that his soul is now captured by a holy love. It’s a moment when beauty becomes a vehicle of grace, resolving Dinesen’s artistic struggle — that art and divine love are not enemies but can unite in redemption.

---

GEORGE DUTCH is a writer, performer, dramaturge, and Associate Artistic Director for 9th Hour Theatre Company. Babette's Feast plays November 6-15th, 2025 at The Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa, Canada.