Faithful Performances

Enacting Christian Tradition

Steven R. Guthrie, Trevor A. Hart, Trevor A. Hart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317136712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The metaphor of performance has been applied fruitfully by anthropologists and other social theorists to different aspects of human social existence, and furnishes a potentially helpful model in terms of which to think theologically about Christian life. After an introductory editorial chapter reflecting on the nature of artistic performance and its relationship to the notions of tradition and identity, Part One of this book attends specifically to the phenomenon of dramatic performance and possible theological applications of it. Part Two considers various aspects of the performance of Christian identity, looking at worship, the interpretation of the Bible, Christian response to elements in the contemporary media, the shape of Christian moral life, and ending with a theological reflection on the shape of personal identity, correlating it with the theatrical metaphors of 'character' and 'performing a part' in a scripted drama. Part Three demonstrates how art forms (including some technically non-performative ones - literature, poetry, painting) may constitute faithful Christian practices in which the tradition is authentically 'performed', producing works which break open its meaning in profound new ways for a constantly shifting context.

PART 1
Theology, Faith and Theatre

The first part of this book attends specifically to the phenomenon of dramatic performance and possible theological applications of it, including critical reflection on and response to seminal initiatives in the field by von Balthasar and Vanhoozer. Ben Quash’s opening essay engages with two key theological commitments which drive and inform von Balthasar’s agenda-setting ‘turn to drama’: first, the essential ‘linearity’ of history and the radical particularity, irreversibility and ‘momentousness’ of events and actions occurring within it; and second, the ‘diversified and communal character of Christian life before God’, a ‘polyphonic, unfinalizable and dialogical’ encounter with truth which resists too rapid or easy a move towards any fixed, monological perspective, and thereby conscripts us as participants in a continuing conversation, rather than passive recipients of an omniscient narration. Ivan Khovacs urges that von Balthasar’s project, while tantalizing and full of promise, demands to be pushed much further yet if the deeper veins of promise are ever to be tapped. Specifically, there must be a genuine exchange of insights between theology and theatre, rather than a mere quarrying of drama ‘to enrich the language of theology’. Theologians must take fully seriously and learn to respect the peculiar artistry of the theatre, engaging with it, for example, as a ‘three-dimensional, performative event’, rather than an alternative body of literature, something which Balthasar shows some reluctance to do. Khovacs directs us to the work of Kevin Vanhoozer and Shannon Craigo-Snell for helpful examples of a theological exchange with ‘theatre’ in this more full-blooded sense, taking rehearsal and performance respectively as paradigms for the interpretation and embodiment of a text. Joshua Edelman, writing from the side of theatre, continues the line of enquiry, offering a sharp critical reaction to Vanhoozer’s work which, he argues, while breaking important and fruitful interdisciplinary ground, does not yet go as far as it might in quarrying the available resources, and leaves itself vulnerable to criticism by its focus on a particular strand of dramatic theory and practice. In particular, further engagement with some key figures in post-Stanislavskian dramaturgy – Brecht and Mamet are the examples treated here – would, Edelman suggests, raise rather different questions and thereby furnish a more adequate set of resources with which to pursue the dialogue further.

Chapter 1
Real Enactment: The Role of Drama in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar

Ben Quash

No one can appreciate the full truth of the Christian revelation unless he or she is a player within its distinctive dynamics – participating in the drama of God’s self-communication to the world and living out its implications in committed action. This is why von Balthasar does not write the part of his trilogy that deals with knowing the true until he has written the parts that deal with seeing the glorious and with doing the good. There ought not to be any presumption to having an analytical distance from God’s action in and for the world, in whose middle human beings are situated. How could anyone possibly hope to be able to step out of this drama – a drama that so fundamentally determines creaturely existence? How could anyone look at it from ‘outside’ or ‘above’? Such a viewing platform is not available. As von Balthasar himself puts it:

The life common to Christ and the Church is ... actual life poised between perdition and redemption, sinfulness and sanctity. The existence of sin within the field of force of grace, the impact, here and now, between despairing obduracy and crucified love, these, and not a colourless and static world of philosophy, are the matter of theology. This is why it cannot be expressed solely in the sleek and passionless form of the treatise, but demands movement, sharp debate ..., the virile language of deep and powerful emotion ...¹

Theology is done not outside or above the drama of Christian living, it is itself part of the drama: and von Balthasar’s writings try to express this. He is ‘concerned with expounding the word of God, which is as much a word of life as a word of truth’.² And his theological heroes are those great teachers of the Church who managed never to be the victims of such a false separation between knowledge and life.

In this chapter, I want to isolate two of the central theological commitments that drive von Balthasar’s thought and which his turn to drama is designed to carry forward. They can be summarised at this stage as (first) a concern to take the linearity of history seriously, and therefore the uniqueness and ‘once only’ character of actions in the world. This is the context for what might be called the ‘tragic sensibility’ in his theology, which although it is often undermined by his synthesising and idealist instincts (as I have argued elsewhere),³ nevertheless exists, and is perhaps the principal reason for Donald MacKinnon’s admiration of his thought. We will approach this first Balthasarian commitment via a more general set of reflections on tragedy that will help to sharpen an appreciation of the importance of what von Balthasar is suggesting in his description of human lives as being situated in a real drama.

The second central commitment is that to the social and ‘many-voiced’ character of the Christian witness to truth in the world – a witness made up of many perspectives, and enacted in many ‘missions’. This social and many-voiced quality is manifest in the scriptures themselves and by their role in Christian life and thought. It is also displayed in the character of the Church. We will come at this second area of investigation by seeing why neither lyric poetry nor (for the purposes of this essay) the novel quite meet von Balthasar’s theological requirements – why drama is the only really satisfactory artistic embodiment of the social (and what von Balthasar believes to be its consummate form, the ecclesial). This will involve a comparison with some of the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussions of genre.

We begin then with a look at tragedy, and its quintessential embodiment of something that von Balthasar takes to be true of all drama, and that adds to drama’s attraction for him as a field of ideas: its linearity.

1. Tragedy

Two Versions of a Genre

Even a brief tour through the historical application of this most famous of all genre terms will reveal a vast and internally contradictory set of understandings. For Aristotle, tragedy dealt with ‘spudean’ matters – that is to say the actions and passions of the noble, people of high character, the good, the superior and the heroic. Some later medieval interpreters supposed on the contrary that it dealt with the filth and foul deeds of the degenerate; things base, low and fetid; supposedly goat-like things (the word tragedy itself, literally interpreted, seeming to mean ‘goat song’). In actual fact, all of the many medieval interpreters of tragedy were largely in the dark as to its ancient forms and origins, and made more or less random guesses on the basis of one reference in Boethius’ sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy, some biased Christian material like that bequeathed by Isidore of Seville, and a little later in the fourteenth century some bits and pieces of Seneca that turned up in Padua. Thus, some think tragedy to be about the vile and unspeakable deeds of kings – primarily crimes – and others think it to be about any kind of lamentable misfortune – sad things. Its style is thought by some to be loud and bombastic, but by others mournful and song-like. And while some presumed tragedy to have a dramatic (or at least narrative) form, others (including Dante) were content to look on lyric poems as tragedies too. There was no unitary understanding of tragedy in the Middle Ages. It did not have to include a disaster factor (though neither did it in fifth-century BC Athens); there was little sense of it as a special genre of literature; and in most of medieval Europe there was a general lack of awareness and a puzzlement concerning the term tragedia.⁴

Despite this range of conflicting or ambiguous usages of the term, it seems worthwhile to try to narrow the tradition down, and to highlight two main applications. Boethius’ influential reference in the sixth century is vital to this. Its appearance in Boethius’ writing ties the idea of tragedy to the concept of Fortune. Fortune is repeatedly personified in medieval writing after Boethius as the mistress or goddess of good and bad luck, spinning her wheel. As H.A. Kelly says, it is an ‘easy and overworked poetic ploy’, and the Lady Fortune becomes so devoid of personality, and so little regards the persons over whom she rules, that ‘Boredom must have been [her] frequent companion’.⁵ Chaucer’s host in his comments after the Monk’s Tale makes his feelings on this matter abundantly clear. If medieval concepts of tragedy come to settle around this particular trope of Fortune and her wheel, then what we have in tragedy at the time of Chaucer is little more than a ‘soporific’ (to use H. A. Kelly’s word)⁶ – a predictable and characterless lamentation over misfortune. So this is the first possibility of a tragic ‘form’ – a ‘soporific’ on the vicissitudes of life.

But Chaucer, and thanks to him eventually Shakespeare, reconstituted the form he inherited in a way that has retained its vitality to the present day. Chaucer responded to those ideas that limited tragedy to the downward movement from prosperity to adversity. The complete cycle of Fortune’s wheel was interrupted by Chaucer; his interest was in only a part of that trajectory in human affairs represented by the trope of the wheel. He concentrated on the decline into wretchedness. And the effect of this concentration was to renew the dramatic force of a linear progression of events rather than a cyclical one; a progression of events which could lead more compellingly to definite, final endings, and endings all the more terrible for their finality. This revitalized the genre, and it proceeded with time to leave the idea of Fortune behind. Here, then, we see a second possible ‘tragic form’ which we are more likely to recognize – and which is more the one that lies behind our metaphorical extension of it in modern usage: tragedy as the irreversible encounter with overmastering, destructive and estranging forces that press a terrible definiteness and constraint on what Donald MacKinnon might call our ‘purposings’.⁷

Incidentally, by a combination of luck and imagination, Chaucer and Shakespeare returned to tragedy a lot of the qualities that gave it its force and momentum in ancient Greece. The subsequent rediscovery of the fifth-century tragedians – of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides – in many ways confirmed the emphases that Chaucer and Shakespeare chose to give to tragedy.

So, we have two contrasting ‘tragic forms’ in rough outline to take with us into a consideration of the possible attraction of drama for a theologian like von Balthasar:

i) a cyclical one reflecting the perpetual vicissitudes of the world and the human’s place in it; and

ii) a more linear one hinting at possibilities of ultimate and inescapable disintegration in individual human lives and perhaps, by extension, in the history of the world itself.

John Beer considered the word ‘vicissitude’ in his 1993 inaugural lecture in the English Faculty at Cambridge (entitled Against Finality)⁸ and saw its latent potential as a term of consolation. Although Newton’s demonstrations seemed to subvert the metaphysical securities of earlier ages, Beer pointed out, the new universe Newton offered was at least one in which while everything fell nothing fell forever. All fallings were eventually caught up in that cyclical round of the planets which in turn allows us to enjoy the changes it creates. This sense of an ‘ultimate mercy’⁹ in the Newtonian universe persists, and is traceable (to take one example) in the poetry of Wordsworth – here in the last stanza of an epitaph:

No motion has she now, no force

She neither hears nor sees,

Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees!¹⁰

In the solar system things end ‘neither in an endless falling nor in a fixed stasis but in a reversion to the cycling processes of ordinary nature’.¹¹ It is not that the epitaph presents a joyous vision; it is certainly somb...