The Christos Paschon and The Byzantine Theater

Abstract

The Christos Paschon and The Byzantine Theater Sandro Sticca It is possible to provide a critical analysis of the Christos Paschon solely on aesthetic grounds, considering the play as a work of dramatic art; however, it is desirable that a formalized discussion of its imaginative range, intellectual and liturgical content be undertaken against the background of the origins and development of the Byzantine theater, especially since, over the years, that problem has hardly been cleared, or resolved. The lack of a substantial dramatic corpus has complicated the process of interpretation and has prevented scholars studying the religious drama of Byzantium from reaching definite conclu­ sions, limiting their inquiries to conflicting and disharmonious statements, to extreme critical polarizations, and often to mis­ leading deductions that are contradicted by the meager evidence available. Because of the paucity of extant dramatic specimens, scholars have been unable to reconstruct fully the historical and literary dimensions of the Byzantine Christian drama; indeed the Christos Paschon, a long cento of verses from the Greek tragic poets and particularly from Euripides, variously dated from the fourth to the eleventh centuries, constitutes the onlyextant attempt to put together in dramatic form the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. For this reason, the majority of èarlier studies on the religious drama in Byzantium have con­ cerned themselves either with the nature of the dramatic form or with arguments and speculations concerning the primacy of the Western or Eastern Church in the creation of a Christian drama. One of the earliest pronouncements on the Byzantine Chris­ tian theater was made in 1756 by Voltaire in his Essai sur les moeurs et Vesprit des nations. Commenting on the origins and 13 14 Sandro Sticca growth of religious dramatic representations in Italy and France, Voltaire wrote: Ces spectacles étaient originaires de Constantinople. Le poëte saint Grégoire de Nazianze les avait introduits pour les opposer aux ouvrages dramatiques des anciens Grecs et des anciens Romains: et comme les choeurs des tragédies grecques étaient des hymnes religieuses, et leur théâtre une chose sacrée, Grégoire de Nazianze et ses successeurs firent des tragédies saintes.l Even after two centuries, Voltaire’s assumptions are still echoed in certain critical quarters. Heinz Kindermann, for instance, in his Theatergeschichte Europas declares that Das Gesamtbild des byzantinischen Theatres aber, soweit wir es heute schon überschauen, offenbart seine—bisher vielfach noch unbekannt gebliebene oder unterschätze— Mittlerfunk­ tion zwischen antikem und mittelalterlichem Theater des Abendlandes.2 Voltaire’s and Kindermann’s observations on the nature of the relationship between the Western and Eastern religious drama on the one hand and the classical Greek theater on the other stem fundamentally from their consideration of the closest con­ junction, in the classical Greek drama, between dramatic action and liturgical rite; and from the realization that in both worlds, the Greek and the Christian, the tragic intuition focuses on a final assertion of a divine order within the universe to which man must conform. They are not the delineation of a theory based on the study of dramatic texts or an investigation, at the comparative level, of the international character of the Christian religious drama and its dissemination. At their best, Voltaire’s and Kindermann’s observations remain, like those of many sub­ sequent writers on the subject, tentative exploratory specula­ tion. Voltaire’s ideas on Christian drama were not subjected to contemporary clarification or imaginative exploration; and one perceives the desolate state of later theatrical historiography when one considers that, as late as 1809, August Wilhelm von Schlegel could affirm without fear of contradition that there was no drama to be found in all Europe during the Middle Ages.3 It was only in the nineteenth century, when scholars began to explore in a systematic and critical fashion the development of the Western medieval religious drama, that discussions also began on the growth of the medieval liturgical dramatic form in The Christos Paschon 15 Byzantium. In his book on the Origines latines du théâtre moderne (1849), one of the earliest and most comprehensive studies of the Western religious drama, E. Du Méril, sensitively applying to literary criticism the norms of historical methodolo­ gy...