Religious drama

“ If drama be at the outset divine, with its roots in ritual, why does it issue in an art profoundly solemn, tragic, yet purely human? The actors wear ritual vestments like those of the celebrants at the Eleusinian mysteries.14 Why, then, do we find them, not executing a religious service or even a drama of gods and goddesses, but rather impersonating mere Homeric heroes and heroines? ”

“ Then, as the laity come to take a more personal interest in Christianity, we find fancy beginning to play around the subject, bringing out its human pathos and charm, until, after a transitional stage, the drama leaves the sanctuary, passes from Latin to the vulgar tongue, is played by lay performers in the streets and squares of the city, and, while its framework remains religious, takes into itself episodes of a more or less secular character. ”

“ But I do not think that any American church short of some Spanish-Indian mission in the Southwest can make the drama more religious.
For America—and, I suspect, for Europe, too—the problem is to find a way to the religious spirit independent of the church. It is not a question of producing plays in cathedrals, but of producing the spirit of life in plays. It is not: Can religion make itself theatrical? But: Can the theater make itself—in a new sense—religious? ”

“ As religion, it is instructive, edifying, and devotional; as art, it is a powerful and absorbing drama, quite unique in the world, with nothing to shock the most refined and sensitive religious instinct, or yet the most ignorant. If any one objects, it will be the slightly educated, and that only to pose, for they probably understand not art, nor heart, nor religion. ”

“ When, in the future, Poetic Drama once more attains the position to which the self-preservative instincts of humanity entitle it, it will be recognized for what it is—the true religious focussing of man’s permanent protest against Fate—lifted above the dust of all ephemeral questioning. It will then be seen that in Poetic Drama, rather than in the noblest sacraments of Religion, the race must find its orchestral unity, the rhythm of its natural and Tragic breathing. ”

“ The productions of the medieval religious drama it is usual technically to divide into three classes. The mysteries proper deal with scriptural events only, their purpose being to set forth, with the aid of the prophetic or preparatory history of the Old Testament, and more especially of Mysteries, miracles, and morals distinguished.the fulfilling events of the New, the central mystery of the Redemption of the world, as accomplished by the Nativity, the Passion and the Resurrection. ”

“ Since those who could principally avail themselves of dramatic representations were the powerful of this world: kings, princes, courtiers, the least religious people, not only utterly indifferent to the questions of religion, but in most cases completely depraved—therefore, in satisfying the demands of its audience, the drama of the fifteenth and sixteenth and seventeenth centuries entirely gave up all religious aim. ”

“ Church and theater would both minister—as neither of them does now—to the life of the spirit. America has no art and no religion which can make drama religious. America does not believe, in any deep sense. Science has shattered dogma, and formal religion has not been able to absorb an artistic or a philosophic spirit great enough to recreate the religious spirit in men. ”

“ This afterwards was extended to the representation of the passion of Christ and religious subjects generally, not only what appertained to the history of the Church but to what was theological, under the titles of miracle plays, mysteries, and moralities, to which a recent writer has felicitously given the general name of the monastic drama. ”

“ One section of art, perhaps the most influential, is the drama.
Therefore the drama, in order to deserve the importance attributed to it, should serve the development of religious consciousness. Such has the drama always been, and such it was in the Christian world. But upon the appearance of Protestantism in its broader sense, i.e., the appearance of a new understanding of Christianity as of a teaching of life, the dramatic art did not find a form corresponding to the new understanding of Christianity, and the men of the Renaissance were carried away by the imitation of classical art. ”

“ Whatever we may say or like, it is an obvious fact that much of what is essential in religious experience, which in a simpler society was only attainable in prayer and sacrifice, communal ceremony or ritual worship, is now attainable to an increasing degree through literature, music, drama, art, and is, again, as a matter of fact, so attained by an increasing number of people who do not profess a creed or belong to a church. ”

“ Still more, if possible, is the religious spirit present, as the animating influence which gives the drama its interest and its vitality. The great moral and spiritual questions which occupy the soul of man, in each play or series of plays, try to work out their own solution by the natural human action of the characters, and by those reflections on the part of the chorus to which the action naturally gives rise. ”

“ Other confraternities and associations readily took a leaf out of the book of these devil-may-care good-fellows, and interwove their religious and moral plays with comic scenes and characters from actual life, thus becoming more and more free and secular in their dramatic methods, and unconsciously preparing the transition to the regular drama. ”

“ The best proof that the religion of the people was of this mixed kind is furnished by the Drama of that age. No man would bring unpopular opinions prominently forward in a play intended for representation. And we may safely conclude, that feelings and opinions which pervade the whole Dramatic Literature of a generation, are feelings and opinions of which the men of that generation generally partook.
The greatest and most popular dramatists of the Elizabethan age treat religious subjects in a very remarkable manner. They speak respectfully of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. ”

“ Numbering about a dozen, and composed with one exception in the short measures of popular poetry, these dramatic eclogues, or amoebean plays, supply the connecting link between the early popular and religious shows and the regular drama. About half are religious in character; of the rest, three treat some romantic episode, one is a study of unrequited passion ending in suicide, and one is a market-day farce, the personae being in each case rude herdsmen. ”

“ Thus the dramatic performances of these primitive peoples are in fact religious or oftener perhaps magical ceremonies, and the songs or recitations which accompany them are spells or incantations, though the real character of both is apt to be overlooked by civilized man, accustomed as he is to see in the drama nothing more than an agreeable pastime or at best a vehicle of moral instruction. ”

“ Having understood this, they will have to search for, and work out, a new form of modern drama, a drama which will serve as the development and confirmation of the highest stage of religious consciousness in men. ”

“ Drama becomes histrionic art indeed, and the stage becomes the mirror in which are reflected the causes and consequences of the deeds of life. Religion soars on wings of aspiration into the empyrean of hope—hope for a purer and better life which bears fruit in purer and better conduct.
The germ of dramatic art is the dance, which in its first stage is religion. Of course religion must be distinguished from theology. Theology is a system of opinions, while religion is a system of worship. ”

“ It is certainly not religion. It goes behind religion. It is the exaltation of which formal creeds are a product. It is the vitality which informs life, and begets art. Out of the intensity of spiritual feeling which rises from the eternal processes of the universe and in turn becomes conscious of them, the thing is born which made Greek tragedy noble and which called drama back to life in the Middle Ages. Then it was the spirit of religion. To-day we might call it the spirit of life.
Both consciously and unconsciously men of the theater have sought to win back this exaltation. ”

“ Everything else is mimetic, phantasmal, tinkling. Deeply do the masters of the drama move us; but the Gospel cleaves, inworks, regenerates. In the theatre, the leading characters go off in death and despair, or with empty conceits and a forced frivolity; in the Gospel, tranquilly, grandly, they are dismissed to a serener life and a nobler probation. Who has not pitied the ravings of Lear and the agonies of Othello? The Gospel pities, but, by a magnificence of plot altogether its own, by preserving, if we may so say, the unities of heaven and earth, it also saves. ”

“ As no holy image would be tolerated; the Saviour and His Saints must disappear entirely from the eyes of men. Then, in his distress, the inspiration came that a sacred drama, performed by living beings, could produce a more powerful effect than word or symbol. ”

“ Thousands of people shrink from the very sound of it, believing that to be religious means the solemn, sour-faced setting of one foot before the other in a hard and narrow way—the shutting out of all beauty, the cutting off of all enjoyment. ”

“ The dramatic exhibitions of the Middle Ages, which originated in the church, or were soon appropriated by the clergy, were of a religious cast, often composed by priests and monks who were frequently the performers of them in the convents. All the old religious plays called Mysteries were divided into Miracles, or Miracle plays, founded on Bible narratives or legends of the saints; and Moralities or Moral plays, which arose out of the former by the introduction of imaginary features and allegorical personages, the story being so constructed as to convey an ethical or religious lesson. ”

“ In the earlier history of religion the dramatic expression of religious aspiration and feeling was almost universal. The dramatic impulse is deeply grounded in human nature, and may be made to appeal to the highest attributes of reverence and devotion. ”

“ The peculiar characteristic of the poetry of the Christian, which he treats as synonymous with the modern, period is that it (having learned from religion that man consists of two elements, an animal and a spiritual, body and soul) makes place in the same work for the two elements which in literature have hitherto excluded each other, the sublime and the grotesque. It is no longer imperative that tragedy should be solemn throughout; it may venture to develop into drama. ”

“ The creatures of the author’s vivid imagination are perfectly formed and fittingly clothed, living, moving, feeling, talking, in complete harmony as the development of the great drama goes on to its consummation. The author has evidently made a careful and profound study of the manifold dangers which beset the Christian church and threaten her spirituality, and consequently her influence and power in saving the lost and maintaining the gospel standard of life and godliness in the world. ”

“ The number of plays in which definite pastoral elements can be traced is surprisingly small, even when every allowance has been made for the fact that we have already included in our examination several pieces which come but doubtfully within the fold. The spirit of the romantic drama, instinct with sturdy life, had little in common with the artificial and unreal sentiment of a tradition which had almost ceased to pretend to a basis in the emotions of natural humanity. ”

“ We have touched on religion, for it is inwoven with our theme, the theatre, which sprang from religion, and, could it be made to preach as it has done, would, without lack of amusement or attraction, become a house of prayer, and not, as it now is, a home of corruption. ”

“ Those religious performances which were the origin of the European theatre, had not escaped this admixture. Christianity is a popular religion; into the abyss of terrestrial miseries, its divine founder came in search of men, to draw them to himself; its early history is a history of poor, sick, and feeble men; it existed at first for a long while in obscurity, and afterward in the midst of persecutions, despised and proscribed by turns, and exposed to all the vicissitudes and efforts of a humble and violent destiny. ”

“ But whether Mother Church or Poetry or Philosophy or Music be the magic-medium, the result is much the same if the motive be not religiously sincere, sincerely religious, piously pure, lofty, and humane. ”

“ And, though foreshadowed in other stories, not until The Passionate Friends of last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in faltering, merely human speech, which is often—it might be safe to say, always—the very crux of the religious spirit as it appears in the modern novel. ”

“ At most there might remain, when the direct experiences of prayer were ruled out as false witnesses, some inferential belief that the whole order of existence must have a divine cause. But this way of contemplating nature, pleasing as it would doubtless be to persons of a pious taste, would leave to them but the spectators' part at a play, whereas in experimental religion and the prayerful life, we seem ourselves to be the actors, not in a play, but in a very serious reality. ”

“ The existence of that evil, which, knowing the constitution of man, we should expect to find prevalent in mysticism, the experience of all ages has shown following, dogging its steps inevitably. So slight is the film that separates religion from sensual passion, that uncontrolled spiritual fervour roars readily into a blaze of licentiousness. ”