The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama: The Eucharist as Theater (review)

In this ambitious study, the author seeks to account for the evolution of early Christian liturgy in the light of the mythological and dramatic traditions of ancient cultures. Drawing heavily on the work of Mircea Eliade and Paul Ricoeur, Schnusenberg elaborates the significance of the claim “[i]n the beginning there was theater” (p. 273) on two levels: the historical and the interpretative. All ancient cultures, she argues, have their cosmogonic myths; at the heart of the rituals, festivals, and practices of their theaters lies the endeavor to represent and mimetically re-enact these creation stories. In a series of learned chapters, she traces wide-ranging examples in the theaters of Egypt and Babylon, Hittite cult-drama and festival, the theater of Canaan-Ugarit, the cosmogony of ancient Israel, and the dramas of ancient Syria. At an analytical level, the pervasiveness of the theme of creativity in dramatic performance across these civilizations points to a fundamental reality—cosmogony itself is inherently an act of staging; the creation of a world by divine agency of one sort of another is, irreducibly, a theatrical business, the primordial presentation of that which is. The dramatic impulse, made manifest in literally endless expressions of human creative activity, is intrinsic to human culture precisely insofar as the cosmos itself is constituted in a piece of drama par excellence.

For Schnusenberg, this insight demands a rethinking of the context of early Christian attitudes to the theater. Contrary to some (alarmingly enduring) Western assumptions, theater was not invented by the Greeks and the Romans, for the emergence of an “official” dramatic setting, the theater of the Greek tragedians and their heirs, amounted only to a development upon a long-established instinct: a capacity now to reflect dramatically on the power of theater to be reflective. When the first Christians started to make their startling claims about the significance of Jesus, they did so in a world in which the supremacy of Rome was supposed (by its architects, at least) to represent the ultimate expression of the triumph embedded in Rome’s founding myths, and Roman theater—games, rituals, and plays—typified the creative expression of that fact. Early devotion to Jesus—the depiction and imitation of his moral character and the celebration of his redemptive actions centrally in the ritual of the Eucharist—was, in a real sense, just another creative act of theater.

It was, of course, a bold one, for in the nascent contention that the Christ-event was the incarnation of the one true God, the original creator of all things, the mimesis practiced by his followers professed universal pertinence. The corporate life and practices of Christ’s followers constituted drama like no other, for in the liturgy of the Eucharist, a performance that absorbed but crucially reshaped both Jewish and Roman practices, the early church saw itself as engaging in representative actions of a definitive order: participating in the ultimate theater of the creator God. It is this that explains the vehemence of early Christianity’s lengthy story of opposition to the Roman or secular theater (a subject explored more fully by Schnusenberg in earlier work). Christian leaders were against the world’s theater not so much because it was theater, but because it was, for them, the wrong theater.

As an exercise in comparative religion, Schnusenberg’s work demonstrates exceptional learning in a very large range of literature; her argument contains many astute observations and is presented with admirable clarity. The foundational assumption about the general cultural significance of cosmogonic drama, although overstated at points, is essentially sound, as certainly is the quest to discern the performative aspects of early Christian piety and the self-consciously competitive missionary strategies by which it was disseminated.

Where the study falls down is in its failure to take nearly seriously enough the radical nature of early Christian drama. Although Schnusenberg rightly sees that the...