Читать книгу New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology - Donald W. Musser - Страница 43

COMEDY

The association of the term “comedy” with theology is, in one sense, a distinctively modern phenomenon. Since the 1960s, the study of the relationships between religion and comedy has become a subfield of religious studies, pioneered by works such as Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools, William Lynch, Christ and Apollo, Dan O. Via, Jr., Kerygma and Comedy in the New Testament, and Conrad Hyers, The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith.

In another sense, however, the connections between comedy and theology have long been recognized; otherwise, the claims now made are the fabrication of a modernity without roots in tradition. In the nineteenth century Søren Kierkegaard drew heavily upon comedy, satire, and irony in criticizing what he saw as the pretensions of Hegelian theology and the State Church of Denmark. In the fourteenth century Dante boldly entitled his religious masterpiece, Commedia, by which he meant that he had couched the drama of salvation in the humble, ordinary language of home, street, and tavern (Italian) rather than the elite, classical language of the day for church, scholarship, and Scripture (Latin). Dante also meant that this work proceeded from Inferno to Paradiso and therefore followed the pattern of many comedies in moving from difficult straits to a light and happy ending. Hell is the least comic place—a point pursued in the mid–twentieth century by C. S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters—for it is the natural conclusion of self-love and thus of pride, greed, jealousy, lust, gluttony, and hatred. Each descending level of hell is smaller than the foregoing one, while heaven is the most comic place, for those who are there are the most open and free. As Dante exclaimed on approaching the eighth level of Paradiso: “I seemed to see the Universe alight with a single smile.” Discussions today also draw upon suggestions made by Paul in characterizing the Gospel as moira—a term whose associations in Greco-Roman culture were with comic characters, clowns, and fools. The preaching of the cross is foolishness, God’s work in the world is foolishness, and the people through whom God works are noted for their foolishness (I Cor. 1:14-31). In making such associations, Paul is seen as offering a summation of themes that are common to biblical theology and ancient comedies. The comic motifs of confounding human wisdom, exposing self-righteousness, thwarting pride, overturning social hierarchies, exposing hypocracies, and coming to the defense of the lowly and oppressed, are common to both comedy and the Bible. “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Matt. 23:12) is a comedic as well as Christian text.

The fact that the corollary of the word “comedy” is tragedy has suggested further connections for recent discussion. Early in the twentieth century the classicist F. M. Cornford advanced the thesis that the origins of both tragedy and comedy are to be found in the ancient Greek spring rites, with tragic action rooted in the first movement of the rites, upon the death of the king and the old year, and the winter return to chaos and infertility. Comic action was rooted in the second movement of the rites, with the resurrection or replacement of the dead king, a royal marriage, and a wedding feast. In these terms, as Wylie Sypher has proposed, the Christian celebration of the Eucharist and the Jewish Passover from which it was derived share in a movement from the tragic to the comic.

Another important connection has been pointed to by Northrop Frye. Tragedies, from ancient Greek to Shakespearean, concern themselves with the noble deeds of divine and royal families (Oedipus Rex, King Lear), while comedies belong more to ordinary people and everyday affairs (Lysistrata, Much Ado About Nothing). In these terms, a biblical anthropology shares in the largely “proletarian” and “egalitarian” character of comedy, with its suspicion of human might and greatness and its elevation of the weak, the powerless, and the despised.

Frye also noted that, whereas tragedies tend to be exclusive, separating people into opposing factions and sorting people out into hierarchies of importance and worth, comedies tend to be inclusive, embracing the whole of the human spectrum, and aiming toward reconciliation, reunification, and celebration: hence the dictum that tragedies often end in funerals, while comedies end in feasts and weddings. The implications of this pattern have been extended by Conrad Hyers in observation that tragedies espouse heroic deeds and military values—honor, duty, loyalty, pride, courage, unwillingness to compromise—whereas comedies espouse the simple joys of everyday life and the virtues of mediation: humility, flexibility, give-and-take, confession of weakness, playfulness, good humor. As a result, while tragedies are willing to sacrifice any number of persons to principles, comedies are inclined to sacrifice principles to persons. Hungry disciples and human suffering take precedence over sabbath laws; forgiveness and mercy transcend judgment and condemnation.

The related subject of religion and humor also has gained considerable attention in recent decades, sparked by Elton Trueblood’s The Humor of Christ (1964). While humor is an element in comedy, and may be equated with the comic spirit that inspires and directs comedy, humor has a wider range of vehicles for its expression: puns, quips, anecdotes, stories, jokes, clowning, and so forth. The main lines of recent discussion have been: (1) the presence of humor in biblical literature, its types and implications; (2) the relevance of humor for doctrine and the theological enterprise; (3) the place and importance of humor in spiritual development, worship, preaching, healing, and the religious life; (4) connections between the role of biblical figures and comic figures: clown, jester, fool, trickster.

The common thread of these various inquiries has been the affirmation that, when the positive forms of the comic spirit are missing, the result is a fall into a variety of evils: absolutism, dogmatism, pride, rigidity, intolerance, fanaticism, idolatry. Without a developed sense of humor and of the human comedy, human affairs easily become tragic, while the noblest attempts at proclaiming a message of love, joy, peace, faith, and hope are easily subverted and turned into their opposites.

CONRAD HYERS

Bibliography

George Aichele, Jr., Theology as Comedy.

Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools.

J. Cheryl Exum, Tragedy and Comedy in the Bible.

Conrad Hyers, The Spirituality of Comedy.

———, And God Created Laughter: The Bible as Divine Comedy.

Cal Samra, The Joyful Christ.

Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ.

Cross-Reference: Anthropology, Faith, Hope, Tragedy.

COMMUNION (See EUCHARIST, SACRAMENTS/SACRAMENTAL THEOLOGY, WORSHIP.)