Tomorrow, when the traditional processions pass through the streets, Christianity’s history of universal salvation will be enacted in a dramatic tableau. Men, women and children will walk like moving costumed statues, removed from society while in it. Statues famous for their penetrating gaze and miraculous reach will leave the churches and be carried among us, part of society but not in it.
The capacities for religious play evolved over time and not all at once- Ranier Fsadni
What’s there to be seen behind, so to speak, what will take place? Is it a living social vision or a fossilised survival from the past? Is it the direct, simple witness of folk religion or a rather more self-conscious enactment where even the tourists play a role? Are adults being children or are children being inducted into the mysteries of adult life?
As usual, it partly depends on who is doing the asking and on not being tripped up by one’s own questions.
Are the processions less traditional and authentic if the costumed participation of young women, increasing from year to year, can be traced back no earlier than the mid-1980s and their appearance owes much to Hedy Lamarr in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949)?
The answers will necessarily be as argumentative as the very religions, Judaism and Christianity, whose scriptures are being enacted in ritualised street theatre. The biblical story is not just an account of what happened but an argument about the meaning of history, about what really went on – glory or failure, weakness or strength – in what took place.
And our repeated arguments about religious displays like those of Good Friday – “mere ritual” or conviction, God or Mammon – continue the argument portrayed by the processions themselves.
Whatever side we take, it would be a mistake to overlook the sheer intricacy of what’s going on. As Robert Bellah shows in his recent Religion In Human Evolution (Harvard), the human capacities in play are both much older than we think, reaching back into our animal past, and key to understanding human evolution and powers.
Bellah is impatient with evolutionary accounts of religion that restrict themselves to understanding how supernatural beliefs are intellectually tolerated. Any account is simplistic, for him, if it ignores that religion is about practice as much as belief, about the idea that to attain your faith you must enact it.
However, he does give a lot of attention to evolutionary accounts of “play” in humans and other animals – that behaviour that seems divorced from the humdrum social order and is pursued for its own enjoyable sake. Among apes, for example, celebrations of food accompany a disregard for the usual social hierarchy. Despite its connotations, play develops a capacity we should take very seriously: the ability to imagine things differently from the way they are.
In human evolution, Bellah believes, it has historically been religion that provided the major occasions of serious play. Even from a strictly secular point of view, such occasions were not escapist or fantasy based. Ritual enabled something profoundly true to be apprehended: “the creative and transformative power of society itself”.
The capacities for religious play evolved over time and not all at once. Gesture – saying something by bodily acting it out – came first. Myth and narrative – organising one’s understanding of oneself as an unfolding story – came second. The capacity to see and speak of the demands of ethics as separate from those of society developed last, in a burst of human creativity spanning China, India, Ancient Greece and Israel during the Axial Age of the first millennium BCE.
Bellah calls this newfound “theoretic” capacity a breakthrough in human history because it enabled solidarity and empathy to be reconceived in universal terms. It opened a space where doubts about life’s daily grind, paradoxes and compulsions could be subjected to systemic critique. It did not eliminate gesture and myth but gave them a new iconic and poetic power.
The account, while encompassing world history, stops 2000 years ago but helps us understand Good Friday. It alerts us, first, against simplifying the processions into any simple single meaning. It is in the nature of such play that it has, condensed within it, several superimposed meanings at the various levels of gesture, storytelling and ethical reflection.
The processions’ sequence brings together in the streets a “theoretic” tradition of biblical interpretation, which dates back to the early Church, and Hollywood’s mythological epics. The stories told encompass those in the Bible, those we tell each other about where we think our society is going and those we tell ourselves when we come to terms with suffering and loss of innocence.
The stately walk of the centurions, the funeral marches of the band clubs, the mask-like, far-seeing gravity of Moses (or Abraham or Barabbas...) and the out-of-frame nod when he acknowledges a spectator’s wave... this mix of sacred and profane, of Russell Crowe and piety, of training and mystery... can only be brought into a single frame by serious play.
It’s not child’s play. The history of our species leaps within us when we hear the first drum roll.
ranierfsadni@europe.com