"No milagro, milagro": The Early Modern Art of Effective Ritual

In El gran teatro del mundo, Pedro Calderón de la Barca tested the limits of early modern scenography: the stage directions of this auto sacramental called for the action to take place on two enormous spheres (59). Allegorical representations of heaven and earth, these globes were large enough to hold the drama's multiple actors and light enough to easily open and close. Behind these globes, which were to appear and vanish several times over the course of the performance, rose an elevated platform from which characters could make their spectacular entrances (61). Furthermore, since the play was first performed as part of the Corpus Christi celebrations in Madrid and Valencia during the late 1630s or early 1640s, the whole stage likely fit onto the mobile carros de corpus of the troupes responsible for the production (Parker 110-11; Rennert 297-321; Shergold 442-44). The play thus explored the conventions and mechanics of theater even as it moved toward the sacramental climax of the Ley de Gracia, making an entry from on high with a consecrated chalice and host solemnly appearing on a table inside the celestial globe (85). At first glance, the complex staging and implicit philosophical skepticism of El gran teatro del mundo seem to belie the overtly pastoral goals of the auto sacramental genre, which included stimulating veneration of the Eucharist and encouraging spectators' actual celebration of the sacrament (Parker 59-60). Particularly salient for an auto sacramental, this apparent tension between an interest in the theatrical quality of human experience and a commitment to the truth of Church doctrine and the efficacy of Church ritual was nonetheless present in many other kinds of literary works of the period as well (Parrack 867-77). It is no exaggeration to say that the supposed contradiction between formal experimentation and philosophical skepticism, on the one hand, and post-Tridentine moralizing, on the other hand, has shaped the very nomenclature of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spanish cultural history (Greer 217-224; Weber 225-232).

Yet the effort to resolve this contradiction has obscured an important insight: to thematize the power of artifice to compel belief was also to display the theological efficacy of religious representation. Autos sacramentales such as El gran teatro del mundo, along with analogous works from different genres, did not, in other words, render newly discerning spectators distrustful of participating in the sacrament of communion. On the contrary, the depiction of dramatic ingenuity and mimetic power alerted audiences to the potentially more powerful but no less conventional nature of religious ritual itself.¹ This is a familiar point to students of Greek tragedy, but it has not figured prominently in understandings of the Spanish Baroque. Correcting this oversight, I demonstrate that when Calderón, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, and other seventeenth-century Spanish authors introduced characters aware of their own fictional status, or when they represented scenes of theatrical and literary production, they often did so to underscore the shared conventions of art and ritual rather than to exaggerate the conflicts between them. Think not only of the staging of El gran teatro del mundo, but also of Ginés's conversion and martyrdom in Lope de Vega's Lo fingido verdadero or Basilio's successful ruse to marry Quiteria in Cervantes's Don Quijote, two episodes that I examine in more detail below.

In recognizing the capacity of spectacle to transform human experience, these authors echoed the opinions of theologians at the Council of Trent, who reconfirmed the doctrine of ritual efficacy, or ex opere operato, as a bulwark against the Protestant reformers' opposing mantra of sola gratia, sola fides, sola scriptura.² The sacraments, these theologians insisted, could please and instruct just as Horace famously thought tragedies should, but they were effective in a theological and cosmological sense as well as in Horace's aesthetic sense. In exploring and displaying the mechanics of literary and theatrical artifice, Spanish playwrights and novelists also shared many of the goals of the early Jesuits, whose industriae, as the new order called its pastoral strategies, were meant not only...