Church Rituals Research Articles

Notes on the oldest Croatian spiritual drama

The oldest Croatian spiritual dramas, ecclesiastical plays, or ecclesiastical theatre performances (hrvatska crkvena prikazanja, skazanja or misterije, mOteri) constitute an important link in the development of European spiritual drama, the foundations of which are to be sought in church rites and in mediaeval Latin poetry. Ecclesiastical plays constitute a simple rhymed poem whose prime task was to propagate gospels and legends. In the fifteenth century at the latest, they were widely known along the entire shore and islands of the Adriatic; in the sixteenth century they crossed the Dalmatian mountains into Bosnia and the Croatian Banat; and even in the first half of the nineteenth century (in 1837) they were played on the island of Hvar. Although this does not constitute proof of their continuity from oldest times, it is, nevertheless, convincing proof of an old tradition and of the great interest of the people in these plays. The difference between the spiritual drama of the nations of western Europe and the Croatian spiritual drama consists, as in most mediaeval and modern literature, in the fact that in the Croatian regions, particularly on the shores of the Adriatic, literature developed under an intensive influence of the Cyrillo-Methodean cultural heritage. Clear proof of this can be seen in the Slavic divine services practiced even in our time as well as in the Old Slavic glagolitic writing which is also used in Bosnia. Religious literature in this script was printed and published in Senj, Rijeka, and Venice as late as the sixteenth century. The Old Slovene culture propagated among the Croatians, or its earlier phase strengthened by the Glagols expelled from territories of Greater Moravia, experienced an unusual flowering of glagolitic literature in the maritime regions. This is evidenced by the great number of manuscripts, relics both religious and secular, written in glagolitic script (in the spirit of western Roman rite). From the twelfth century onward the Cyrillic script, and from the thirties of the fourteenth century the Latin script, were in use, the latter definitely becoming prevalent. However, in the early periods neither the strong Latin

Theater, Drama, and the Second World: A Prologue to Shakespeare

Theater, Drama, and the Second World: A Prologue to Shakespeare Harry Berger, Jr. By using as touchstone the idea of the second world— that is, the model or construct which the mind creates in order to withdraw from the actual environment, thus to offer a clarified image of the world it replaces— one can discern certain identifying marks of two sets of assumptions and world views, which I have called medieval and renaissance.! My aim here is to describe two structurally different forms of drama which are parallel to the first yet more specific: church ritual and Shakespearian play. These labels remind you that the forms are historical— they are embedded in historical circumstance, and have histories which helped shape them. But I am not now going to approach them in their historical context, nor in their historical relation to each other, except perhaps to relate each very briefly to some of the inferences about intellectual history already put forth. The present discussion is primarily structural in character. I The fundamental distinction to be made is that between drama and theater. A play is both drama and theater, and we must under­ stand the way in which these two contexts interact and affect each other. Drama is a Greek word for action, acting, doing, performing. As Aristotle pointed out, drama is primarily a temporal rather than a spatial event, though the terms drama and dramatic tend to fall into two families of reference— when they are not used simply as synonyms for theater and melodramatic: 1) We think first of shaped and significant conflict— of a dialectical action, an interaction, an agon; its module, its purest or most rudimentary form, is unmediated dialogue. 2) But I think a second set of associations directs us toward the sense of the dramatic action as something externalized, and viewed, or imagined, from outside the agonists. Even inner human action, to be made dramatic, has somehow to be externalized, soc­ ialized, made visible, asserted over against an other, exacting a response, or itself a response. Drama as action seems to require a co-presence of agents, and as performance it implies the additional presence of spectators or readers. Dramatic action is thus interaction. 3 4 Comparative Drama Theater comes from a Greek word which denotes a place for seeing, displaying and, again, performing. Where drama demands agents, theater demands actors. Where drama is a certain kind of action capable of representation in a variety of media, theater is a particular medium— primarily visual (not primarily verbal)— which embraces the network of actual circumstances and participants who cooperate in representing and observing a particular action. The theatrical situation is itself inherently dramatic: A play is immediately related to, directly performed before, an audience. Com­ pared with any literary form, the playwright is on the other side of the medium— behind it, not in front of it. His disappearance behind the play leads to a more intense encounter of audience with play world, a more complex interaction among players, characters, and spectators. And since the main fact of the theater is the visual presence of actors playing usually predetermined roles before spectators, the playwright is in a paradoxical position. On the one hand, he has more power than the poet, because his vision is imposed on producers, directors, players and spectators. On the other hand, and for exactly the same reason, he is much more at the mercy of others. He can invent plots, set the scene, and stand behind the arras, but because he has committed his work to the free wills of other interpreters he cannot control their onstage behavior. The theatrical occasion may tempt the actor to subordinate the demands of the script and role to his own ego. The play as a whole may be reduced to a review, a background for the expression of individual personalities. The creator’s more comprehensive idea may be frustrated, and his imaginary world may have to share the stage with the rhetorical self-concern of actors. A struggle may thus arise between the author, with his central con­ sciousness, and his interpreters, each of whom is potentially a central consciousness. From the distinction between theater...

The Ecological Approach to the Church

The church shares in the ordinary processes of growth which characterize the spread of population. The church growth is to a certain extent determined by birthrate and by population shift due to desire for economic betterment. Especially important is the shift of populations due to search for status. Many of its ethical problems grow out of conflicts which come in the presure of population groups upon each other. The Civil War was a conflict between those who wanted quantitative extension of population and those who were insistent on qualitative conditions. Church rituals reflect the great hazards through which populations go in the struggle for existence. The church, through its religious ministry, seeks to assure people in the midst of this struggle. It especially comes in to help people meet those strains which come in the struggle for life on the higher levels.

SANITATION AT THE COMMUNION SERVICE.

The Bedford Avenue Church (Baptist) of Brooklyn, New York, has followed the example of a church in Rochester, in bringing into use individual cups for the communion service. This step has been under consideration for six months, under the lead of the pastor,Dr. Gunning, who is a graduate in medicine. The cups adopted in this instance have a capacity of one-half an ounce, and the wine that will be used will be an unfermented grape-juice. This new arrangement will for a time stand as the ultra-sanitary plan for this act of church ritual. The most weighty argument that has been used for the furtherance of the new plan has been that there seems to be no good and sufficient reason why cleanly people should drink from one common sacramental chalice, any more than the same people should have a repugnance to making use of one common teaspoon, or one