The Last Trinitarian Word

Here is the last lecture from my Trinity course this fall

When I was eleven years old, I had a life changing experience, although I did not realize it at the time. Every Saturday afternoon, I went with my best friend in the whole world, David E. to the matinee at the Tivoli. The fun of going to a matinee when you are eleven years old usually has little or nothing to do with the quality of the film. In fact, I really don’t think the Tivoli was in the business of showing films at all, at least to eleven year olds. Rather, they showed movies. Movies are essentially different from films in that movies are entertaining and you don’t have to “process” them much. Likewise, going to the movies was fun. You could sit in the balcony and subtly drop “old maids” on the unsuspecting patrons below. You could serendipitously shoot soda from a straw at the heads of the women in front of you. You could consume junior mints until you puked. It was fun and the movie had little to do with the whole business.
However, if the movie was any good, that was certainly a bonus. On any given Saturday matinee at the Tivoli, you could usually count on movies from one of three basic genres. First were the westerns. In the early seventies, these usually involved Clint Eastwood riding around the desert with a menacing expression of his face and not saying anything. Not very interesting. Second were the war movies. These usually involved a great deal of yelling, blowing things up and masculine feelings, that is to say stoic sorrow at the death of your best buddy. These films generally were interesting from the standpoint of the violence, but even stoic emotions made eleven year olds uncomfortable. Third were the horror movies. These were the best. Horror fascinates the eleven year old male mind because, in general, it is his prevailing reaction to the rapidly changing world around him. Masculine enculturation, however, does not allow for an appropriate reaction to existential horror, so the theatre must fulfill its Aristotelian destiny and be the prepubescent locus for catharsis.
This particular Saturday was serving horror at the Tivoli. The film was called Theatre of Blood. What could be more promising than that? It was guaranteed to be a cathartic buffet. What it served up, however, was a bit unexpected. O there was the usual blood, gore, black comedy and mayhem that one expects from horror movies, but there was another nagging “something” going on in this one. A bit of plot explanation is now in order.
Theatre of Blood stars the inimitable Vincent Price as an old Shakespearean actor named Edward Lionheart. Edward is an actor of the “old school,” that is to say, melodramatic, over the top, and excessive. In other words, he was a ham. Now there is a great tradition of ham acting that pervades the history of theatre from the time Plautus trod the boards until the century just passed. But ham acting’s time had passed for Edward’s public and as a result he was flayed alive by the British critics (I forgot to mention that this movie was about English people) who were looking for a new approach to old classics. In the critical mind, therefore, Edward’s King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, etc. were relics of a past age, one that was hoped would never return. Edward’s career was ruined by critical denunciation.
However, ham actors never die and Edward Lionheart was no exception. Rather than peaceably retire to the old actors’ home, Edward decides to exact revenge on his persecutors. (For the eleven year old, this is where the fun began.) One by one, the spiteful critics were lured into an old theatre and murdered (and here’s the kick) according to the plots of Shakespeare plays. Thus, one critic gets stabbed like Caesar. One is beheaded, after the fashion of Cymbeline. Another has his pet doggies served to him in a casserole a la Titus Andronicus. It was all great fun, and of course, you didn’t need to get the Shakespeare bits in order to enjoy the spectacle of stuffy old English people getting chopped up and mutilated. David E. and I left the Tivoli that day filled with a great sense of having accomplished something. Our own violent emotions were somehow curbed in light of Edward’s excesses. Lacan triumphed again!
For weeks after that Saturday afternoon, however, I was left with a certain uncomfortable sensation. I had noticed that while David and I “oooed” and “grossed” in all the right places, other people in the Tivoli, that is to say unsuspecting grown-ups who had (obviously) mistakenly come to the Saturday matinee, thought the movie was funny and entertaining in a completely different way. They laughed in places we did not. They were able to anticipate certain ends that took us by surprise. It was almost as though they were watching a completely different movie, or at least one showing simultaneously to Theatre of Blood. In the days after my matinee experience, I began to think about that “other movie.” It was as if there were some inside joke or some dimension that my unfocused vision could not see. All that Shakespeare business alluded me. There was more there than met my eye.
Fast forward thirty years. Last summer, I was in London doing research for a paper I was writing and I happened to notice in the news that there was a play at the National Theatre titled: Theatre of Blood. Could it be the same story as my haunting matinee? Curiosity got the best of me and so I purchased a ticket and went to that night’s performance. It was indeed the same story, only this time transferred to the stage, filled with grand guignol stage devices, fake blood and frank camp. This time I got all of the Shakespeare bits. I thoroughly enjoyed all the inside jokes about theatre and actors. Furthermore, at the end of the play, there was a kind of coda, a scene not in the movie that gave a final twist to the proceedings. Let me set the stage a bit. Old Edward is down to his last critic. The young man is strapped into a chair and is about to be blinded with hot knives, like Gloucester in King Lear. Of course, there has to be a last dialogue. When the critic asked Edward why he was killing his critics, the old actor responds:
Because you have done the theater to death. This stage used to be a place of drama, of excitement. It was a place where people could be frightened, where they could fall in love, swoon and cry out in support of heroes. It used to be a place where drama was wedded to life, the real life of men and women, not some abstract life that no one lives, no one cares about. You have made it a place of ideas, of theories about the theatre, about life. Now it is cold. Now it is for the elite and not the masses. Now it is dead as you are soon to die. You are the murderers of dreams and thus your own nightmare, a living theatre, proves to be your end.

Of course, all of this is very interesting, at least to me, but readers might be asking around this time, “Why the nostalgia, Denis?”
Over the years I have come to think of Theatre of Blood as an iconic event in my young life, the moment I was awakened to meaning, to depth, and to the vagaries of plot. Two summers after my matinee experienced I made the decision to convert to Catholicism, abandoning the somewhat flat narrative devices of my fundamentalist evangelical upbringing for meaning in the theatre of blood of the Catholic Church. In the Catholic Church there was more than met the eye. In the Church there was drama rather than endless monologue. In the Church there was history and depth of experience stretching back across the centuries. In the Church there was the possibility of loosing oneself in a project of epic proportions.
Now, of course, I see the Church from a different perspective, no longer as an awestruck child looking up at a much larger and more mature parent. Today, as a theologian, I see the Church with a more jaded academic eye and I wonder. What is the condition of the Church today? What is its “theatrical” status? Any number of people in the Church today will try to express that in the aftermath of the hypercritical last decades of the twentieth century, something has gone missing from Church life. Some call it transcendence, some mystery. But we might as well call it drama. Here, I do not mean drama in the sense of something over the top, or even false. Rather, I mean drama in the sense of the Greeks, something that is significant to life, a vehicle of ultimate meaning and catharsis. Has the Church ceased being a theatre of blood? Has the influence of critics analyzed and assessed the Church until it has become little more than an idea in some people’s minds and not a very good idea at that. Have we probed, dissected, studied, and didacticized the Church to death? Have we explained away all the symbols, all the mystery? Have we individualized faith and psychologized faith until there is no longer hope for the Church to suffer the messiness of community? Have we transmogrified the heat of a theater of blood into the coolness of a theater of ideas? Have we anthropologized faith until we have nothing remaining but a desiccated specimen of what once was?
If this is the case, theologians must bear some of the burden. Like Lionheart’s critics, in our insatiable desire to make the Church respectable in the world of modern thought, we have made compromises. We have wedded ourselves to alien spouses, unsympathetic philosophical systems, social theories and psychological ideologies. In giving a rather esoteric lecture in Belgium a few years ago, I asked my audience how a certain feature of postmodern theology might play out in parish life. The mostly Flemish group seemed stunned by the question. What could theology possible have to do with what old people did in church on Sunday? When pressed a bit, one member of the group tentatively suggested that if there was a problem of assimilation of theological ideas in parishes, the answer might be that more churchgoers should be studying Heidegger. How out of touch can some theologians be with the living reality of the Church? The critics seem to have done to death the theatre of blood.
There is dissatisfaction on the part of many younger Catholics with the seeming disjunction between thought and practice. How can this tension be rectified? How can we understand the almost complete dismantling of Catholic culture in the past fifty years? Needless to say a great deal of that culture needed to be rethought, but once it was gone, what arose to take its place? Are we living in the aftermath of a deconstructed Catholicism which is struggling to reclaim its dramatic hold on the lives of the faithful?
Where is the drama in the Church today? Or we might more appropriately ask where the passion is. When I was a seminarian, I had a classmate who left the seminary. From all outward appearances, from all his behaviors and skills, he was an ideal candidate for priesthood, intelligent, well-spoken, and sensitive to the needs of others. When we talked about why he was leaving the seminary, he told me he did not have the passion to be a priest. Passion is an essential element for priesthood, those who are configured in persona Christi. Passion is necessary if we are to remain engaged on a daily basis with the thousand mendacities that the priest must confront. If we do not have passion then we cannot be very effective icons of involvement in the life of the Church. If we have no passion, can we expect to be able to engender it in the lives of the faithful?
One aspect of the lives of younger Catholics in the Church today is a renewed sense of drama. Young people today tend to view religion as an all or nothing proposition. If they are involved in Church, they tend to be totally involved, to see the Church as an all engrossing theatre of blood. They tend to be more emotionally engaged with the Church than their parents. Abstractions are not unimportant to them, but as Cardinal Newman once remarked, no one ever died for a syllogism. All of this is not to sound too anti-intellectual. God forbid. There is no greater need in the Church today than quality catechesis at every stage of life. However, we must have a living context for quality intellectual pursuits in the life of the Church. All theology must be pastoral or at least move fairly quickly to the pastoral. All critical thought must lead us to the Mystery rather than attempt to explain it. Theology must transform and inspire us to deeper involvement, to see the wonder of the Church as central to our lives because it touches profoundly upon the Real. Theology must expand our faith rather than contract it. Again, as Newman said, all of theology must give evidence to life and growth. Then we are in the context of the theodramatic. If our faith is ultimately not about the engagement of abstractions or the perpetuation of social values, but a perichoretic dance with the Holy Trinity, then we must move, we must engage, we must risk everything. The Trinity calls us to be a people of involvement, involvement in the messiness of one another’s lives, a theatre of blood. But that is dangerous, in that being caught up in the movement of God, we may likely loose our selves, or more likely find our true selves in the imago Dei
If only we could somehow re-discover our matinee selves. If only we could see through the eyes of wonder that we employed as eleven year olds. If only we could reclaim the sweat and blood, the genius of a faith whose sanguine reality comes to us so palpably as we gather at the altar. Then undoubtedly we would experience a new evangelization. Then undoubtedly we would know God as Father, Son and Spirit in the interpenetrating reality of life.