Power and Conflict in Medieval Ritual and Plays: The Re-Invention of Drama

Many fine twentieth-century studies of the Latin liturgical drama have explored the correspondences between the plays and the Carolingian liturgy as well as the dramatized Ottonian Quem quaeritis tropes. Certainly, all three are hybrid works, consisting of stylized enactments of chanted texts.¹ Since each involves some sort of acting out, scholars generally infer that the originating principle of drama is impersonation. They also assume that the church plays grew out of one or both of the earlier forms, even though they acknowledge that the plays somehow constitute a distinct category.² Indeed, very different principles govern the actions in each kind of work because imitation by actors in and of itself does not account for the origin and structure of the Latin plays or of drama in general.³

As I argue, the Carolingian liturgy, tropes, and plays differ radically because they embody divergent notions of the power or powerlessness inherent not only in human beings but also in their relationships to God.⁴ Liturgists adapted St. Augustine's belief in absolute divine potency and its necessary corollary, human and angelic (or demonic) impotence: the Eucharistic rite became a real re-creation of Christ's presence and actions, not a mimetic representation. The Quem quaeritis verses, some hundred years later, were mimetic, a kind of figurative representation. Yet they still supported the liturgy's Augustinian principles because they featured clerics who impersonated human and angelic actions highlighting unquestioning obedience to God's will.⁵ In contrast, the liturgical drama, which did not appear until the end of the eleventh century, adapts the Augustinian design of earthly history to accommodate the ideas of human potency developed by Peter Abelard (1079-1142).⁶ Most importantly, this radical change empowers the human characters to choose and shape their engagement in various conflicts on earth.⁷

Four well-known, readily available eleventh-century plays-Hilarius's The Raising of Lazarus and the Fleury Easter Visit to the Sepulchre, Christmas Nativity, and Slaughter of the Innocents-are typical of the church dramatists' innovative representations of human nature and earthly experience. Indeed, Hilarius studied under Abelard at the school of the Paraclete, becoming a wandering poet-scholar who subsumed his master's principles into his own creative approach to drama.⁸ The three Fleury plays, by an unknown author (or authors), are among the finest examples of early Latin drama.⁹ All four works, like their generic counterparts, incorporate verses from scriptural and liturgical texts into fictive versions of earthly struggles for and against Christ, struggles that affect heavenly as well as earthly existence. The four plays also end with a Te Deum or an alternative hymn, as if they were to be interpolated into the service. In this context, the moral and emotional oppositions between earthly adversaries-who are relatively equal in power and to whom the outcome is equally vital-counterbalance both the Mass-ritual's promise of God-given transcendent peace and the tropes' representation of angelic and human obedience. Thus, the mimetic exploits comprising the Lazarus and the Fleury plays vividly attest that impersonation of conflicts, not just of characters, is the seminal and distinguishing element of drama as a genre.

I. The Augustinian Tradition and the Carolingian Liturgy

The ninth-century Mass-liturgy provided a kind of anti-drama built on Augustinian philosophical and theological ideas of divine omnipotence.¹⁰ As J. A. Jungmann explains, the key ceremony, the Eucharistic rite, privileges "a wonderful identification of Christ and the Priest. In the person of the Priest, Christ Himself stands at the altar, and picks up the bread, and lifts up 'this goodly chalice' (Psalm 22:5) ("hunc praeclarum calicem"). Through this mode of speech, clear expression is given to the fact that it is Christ Himself who is now active, and that it is by virtue of the power deriving from Him that the transubstantiation which follows takes place."¹¹ This belief in the Mass as consisting of divine instead of human actions stood at the core of orthodox doctrine and worship from the ninth...