Mimesis (30 page)

From this text—especially from the phrase,
for le filz qu’ istra de Marie
—it is clear that Adam has advance knowledge of all of Christian world history, or at least of Christ’s coming and the redemption from that original sin which he, Adam, has just committed. In the very depth of his despair he already knows of the grace which will be fulfilled in its time. That grace—albeit a thing of the future, and even of a specific historically identifiable part of the future—is nevertheless included in the present knowledge of any and all times. For in God
there is no distinction of times since for him everything is a simultaneous present, so that—as Augustine once put it—he does not possess foreknowledge but simply knowledge. One must, then, be very much on one’s guard against taking such violations of chronology, where the future seems to reach back into the present, as nothing more than evidence of a kind of medieval naïveté. Naturally, such an interpretation is not wrong, for what these violations of chronology afford is in fact an extremely simplified overall view adapted to the simplest comprehension—but this simultaneous overall view is at the same time the expression of a unique, exalted, and hidden truth, the very truth of the figural structure of universal history. Everything in the dramatic play which grew out of the liturgy during the Middle Ages is part of one—and always of the same—context: of one great drama whose beginning is God’s creation of the world, whose climax is Christ’s Incarnation and Passion, and whose expected conclusion will be Christ’s second coming and the Last Judgment. The intervals between the poles of the action are filled partly by figuration, partly by imitation, of Christ. Before his appearance there are the characters and events of the Old Testament—of the age of the Law—in which the coming of the Saviour is figurally revealed; this is the meaning of the procession of prophets. After Christ’s Incarnation and Passion there are the saints, intent upon following in his footsteps, and Christianity in general—Christ’s promised bride—awaiting the return of the Bridegroom. In principle, this great drama contains everything that occurs in world history. In it all the heights and depths of human conduct and all the heights and depths of stylistic expression find their morally or aesthetically established right to exist; and hence there is no basis for a separation of the sublime from the low and everyday, for they are indissolubly connected in Christ’s very life and suffering. Nor is there any basis for concern with the unities of time, place, or action, for there is but one place—the world; and but one action—man’s fall and redemption. To be sure, the entire course of world history is not represented each time. In the early periods we have only separate fragments, most frequently Easter and Christmas plays which arose from the liturgy. But the whole is always borne in mind and figurally represented. From the fourteenth century on, the full cycle appears in the mystery plays.

The everyday and real is thus an essential element of medieval Christian art and especially of the Christian drama. In contrast to the feudal literature of the courtly romance, which leads away from the
reality of the life of its class into a world of heroic fable and adventure, here there is a movement in the opposite direction, from distant legend and its figural interpretation into everyday contemporary reality. In our text the realistic is still within the frame of the actualization of domestic episodes, of a conversation between the wife and the flattering seducer and another between husband and wife. There are as yet no coarsely realistic or farcical elements; at most the scurrying about of the devils (
interea Demones discurrant per plateas, gestum facientes competentem
) may have given occasion for some crude jokes. But later it is different: realism of a coarser grain begins to thrive, and varieties of mixed style, of the blunt juxtaposition of Passion and crude farce, develop, which to us appear strange and unseemly. When this development actually began cannot be clearly ascertained. But it was probably much earlier than the surviving dramatic texts make it appear. For complaints about the growing coarseness of the liturgical plays (not to be confused with their outright condemnation: that is another problem, which cannot be taken up in our context) occur as early as the twelfth century—for example in Herrad of Landsberg. It is most likely that a good deal of this sort of thing was already in evidence at that period, for, in general, it is the period of a reawakening popular realism. The subliterary survival of the tradition of the antique mime and the more conscious, more strongly critical, and more forceful observation of life, which, beginning with the twelfth century, seems to have set in among the lower classes too, led at that time to a flourishing development of the popular farce, whose spirit may well be assumed to have soon found its way into the religious drama as well. The audience was exactly the same; and it seems that even the lower clergy often shared the taste of the people in these matters. In any case, the extant documents of Christian dramatic literature indicate that the realistic and in particular the grotesque and farcical element became increasingly current, that it reached a climax in the fifteenth century, and thus afforded a sufficiency of arguments to the ultimately successful attacks of the countermovement which, inspired by humanist taste and (from Wycliffe on) by the sterner attitudes of the Reformation, considered the Christian mysteries tasteless and unseemly.

The popular farce does not enter into our discussion because its realism remains within the limits of the purely comic and unproblematic. But we shall list certain scenes from the mysteries which initiated a particularly striking development of realism. To begin with, there is
the nativity in the stable at Bethlehem, with ox and ass and sometimes also midwives and godmothers (together with the appropriate dialogue) and occasionally the most outspoken episodes involving Joseph and the maids. Then the announcement to the shepherds, the arrival of the Three Kings, and the slaughter of the children are given realistic trappings. Still more striking and, to later taste, still more unseemly, are the outspoken scenes connected with the Passion: the crude and sometimes farcical conversations between the soldiers while Christ is crowned with thorns, is scourged, carries the cross, and finally even during the crucifixion itself (throwing dice for the clothes, the scene with Longinus, etc.). Among the episodes connected with the Resurrection there is especially the visit of the three Marys to the shop of the chandler (
unguentarius
) to buy ointments for the body of Christ, and the running and racing of the disciples to reach the sepulchre (according to John 20: 3, 4); the former is turned into a marketplace scene, the latter into a frolicsome free-for-all. The representation of Mary Magdalene in her sinful days is sometimes detailed and precise, and in the procession of the prophets there are also a few figures which give occasion for grotesque scenes (Balaam and the ass!). Our list is quite incomplete. There are conversations between workmen (at the building of the Tower of Babel for instance), who discuss their trades and the bad times. There are noisy and boisterous scenes at inns, and farcical jokes and dirty stories in plenty. All this finally leads to abuse and disorder, and it may rightly be said that the colorful world of contemporary life occupies an ever-increasing place. Yet it is misleading to speak of a progressive secularization of the Christian passion play, as is generally done. For the
saeculum
is included in this drama as a matter of principle and from the beginning, and the question of more or less is not a question of principle. A real secularization does not take place until the frame is broken, until the secular action becomes independent; that is, when human actions outside of Christian world history, as determined by Fall, Passion, and Last Judgment, are represented in a serious vein; when, in addition to this manner of conceiving and representing human events, with its claim to be the only true and valid one, other ways of doing so become possible.

Then too the transfer—anachronistic to our way of feeling—of the events into a contemporary setting and into contemporary forms of life is equally unexceptionable. This again is something which, in the
Mystère d’Adam
, is only indicated to the extent that Adam and Eve speak like simple people of twelfth-century France (
tel paltonier qui
ço ad fait
). Elsewhere and later, this is much more striking. In the fragment of a French Easter play which belongs to the beginning of the thirteenth century and which likewise survives in only one manuscript (I use the text in Förster-Koschwitz,
Altfranzösisches Übungsbuch
, 6th edition, 1921, pp. 214ff.), the subject matter is the scene with Joseph of Arimathaea and the scene with the blind Longinus who is healed by Christ’s blood; here Pilate’s soldiers are referred to as
chivalers
or addressed as
vaissal
; and the whole tone of social intercourse—in the conversations between Pilate and Joseph, for example, or between Joseph and Nicodemus—is quite unmistakably and touchingly the tone of thirteenth-century France. At the same time the figural “omnitemporalness” of the events works most harmoniously and effectively toward the end of embedding them in the familiar setting of popular everyday life. To be sure, some quite modest and naive attempts in the direction of a separation of styles are also to be found. They occur in the earliest liturgical drama, and indeed even in the sequence which is of such great importance as its precursor, the
Victimae paschali
, when the more dogmatic introductory verses are almost immediately followed by the dialogue:
Dic nobis Maria. …
Something corresponding is to be seen in the alternate use of Latin and Old French in several plays from the beginning of the twelfth century, as for example the
Sponsus
(
Romania
22, 177ff.). Our
Mystère d’Adam
puts some particularly solemn passages into rhymed decasyllabic quatrains, which are weightier in tone than the octosyllabic rhymed couplets otherwise employed. From a much later period we have in the
Mystère du vieil Testament
some passages (quoted by Ferdinand Brunot in his
Histoire de la langue française
, 1, 526ff.) in which God and the angels speak a strongly Latinized French while workmen and thieves, and especially Balaam in conversation with his ass, express themselves in decidedly spicy colloquial language. But in all these cases the approximation is too close to give the impression of a real separation of styles. On the contrary their effect is to bring the two spheres together. This style-mingling approximation of the two spheres is not limited to Christian dramatic literature; it is found everywhere in Christian literature throughout the Middle Ages (in some countries, especially Spain, in later periods too), as soon as that literature is addressed to a wider circle. This must have been especially apparent in the realm of the popular sermon, of which, however, we possess a fair number of examples only from a very late period. In these the juxtaposition of a figural use of Scripture and of drastic
realism appears in a way which impresses the taste of later ages as grotesque. In this connection the reader may consult E. Gilson’s very informative essay “La Technique du sermon médiéval” (in the collection of his papers,
Les Idées et les Lettres
, Paris, 1932, pp. 93ff.).

At the beginning of the thirteenth century there appears in Italy a man who embodies, in exemplary fashion, the mixture we are discussing of
sublimitas
and
humilitas
, of ecstatically sublime immersion in God and humbly concrete everydayness—with a resulting irresolvable fusion of action and expression, of content and form. He is Saint Francis of Assisi. The core of his being and the impact of his life are centered upon the will to a radical and practical imitation of Christ. In Europe, after the age of the martyrs had ended, this had come to assume a predominantly mystico-contemplative form; he gave it a turn toward the practical, the everyday, the public, and the popular. Self-surrendering and meditative mystic though he himself was, the decisive thing for him and his companions was living among the people, living among the lowliest as the lowliest and most despised of them all:
sint minores et subditi omnibus
. He was no theologian, and his knowledge, though respectable in itself and ennobled by his poetic powers, was essentially popular, direct, and concretely accessible. His humility was not at all of the sort which fears public contacts or even public display. He forced his inner impulse into outer forms; his being and his life became public events; from the day when, to signify his relinquishment of the things of this world, he gave back his clothes to his upbraiding father before the eyes of the bishop and the whole town of Assisi, down to the day when, dying, he had himself laid naked on the naked earth so that, as Thomas of Celano put it (
Legenda secunda
, 214), in his last hour, when the archfiend might still rage, he could fight naked with a naked enemy (
ut hora illa extrema, in qua poterat adhuc hostis irasci, nudus luctaretur cum nudo
), everything he did was a scene. And his scenes were of such power that he carried away with him all who saw them or only heard of them. The great saint of the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux, was also a fisher of men, and his eloquence was irresistible. He too was an enemy of human wisdom (
sapienta secundum carnem
), and yet how much more aristocratic, how much more rhetorically erudite is his style. I should like to show this by an example, and I choose two letters of similar content for the purpose. In his Epistle 322 (Pat. Lat. 182, 527-528) Bernard congratulates a young nobleman upon forsaking the world of his own free will and entering a monastery. Bernard
praises his wisdom, which is from above; he thanks God for having given it to him; he encourages him and fortifies him against future trials by referring to the help of Christ:

… Si tentationis sentis aculeos, exaltatum in ligno serpentem aeneum intuere (Num. 21, 8; Ioan. 3, 14); et suge non tam vulnera quam ubera Crucifixi. Ipse tibi erit in matrem, et tu eris ei in filium; nec pariter Crucifixum laedere aliquatenus poterunt clavi, quin per manus eius et pedes ad tuos usque perveniant. Sed inimici hominis domestici eius (Mich. 7, 6). Ipsi sunt qui non te diligunt, sed gaudium suum ex te. Alioquin audiant ex puero nostro: si diligeretis me, gauderetis utique, quia vado ad patrem (Ioan. 14, 28). “Si prostratus,” ait beatus Hieronymus, “jaceat in limine pater, si nudato sinu, quibus te lactavit, ubera mater ostendat, si parvulus a colle pendeat nepos, per calcatum transi patrem, per calcatam transi matrem, et siccis oculis ad vexillum crucis evola. Summum pietatis est genus, in hac parte pro Christo esse crudelem.” Phreneticorum lacrymis ne movearis, qui te plangunt de gehennae filio factum filium Dei. Heu! Quaenam miseris tam dira cupido (Verg. Aen. 6, 721)? Quis tam crudelis amor, quae tam iniqua dilectio? Corrumpunt bonos mores colloquia mala (I Cor. 15, 33). Propterea, quantum poteris, fili, confabulationem hospitum declinato, quae, dum aures implent, evacuant mentem. Disce orare Deum, disce levare cor cum manibus; disce oculos supplices in caelum erigere, et Patri misericordiarum miserabilem faciem repraesentare in omni necessitate tua. Impium est sentire de Deo, quod continere possit super te viscera sua, et avertere aurem a singultu tuo vel clamore. De caetero spiritualium patrum consiliis haud secus quam majestatis divinae praeceptis acquiescendum in omnibus esse memento. Hoc fac, et vives; hoc fac, et veniet super te benedictio, ut pro singulis quae reliquisti centuplum recipias, etiam in praesenti vita. Nec vero credas spiritui suadenti nimis id festinatum, et in maturiorem aetatem differendum fuisse. Ei potius crede qui dixit: Bonum est homini, cum portaverit iugum ab adolescentia sua. Sedebit solitarius, levavit enim se supra se (Thren. 3, 27/8). Bene vale, studeto perseverantiae, quae sola coronatur.