2 - Vision and vocation in the theatre of God

Summary

“Pass in, pass in,” the angels say,

“In to the upper doors,

Nor count compartments of the floors,

But mount to paradise

By the stairway of surprise.”

Emerson, “Merlin”

“But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell.”

Milton, Paradise Regained

The great cycles of playlets performed in English towns in the later Middle Ages, strings of miraculous incidents depicting all or most of universal history, were committed by their architecture to evoking from their audience play by play an overarching wonder at the size, magic, and majesty of God's design. Into the interstices of this structure were fitted, like the gargoyles and roof-bosses on the great cathedrals, vignettes of contemporary life, bits of social commentary and popular stories about apocryphal figures. The cycles in turn took their place in an array of town ceremonies that celebrated at once a Church feast, usually Corpus Christi, and the secular order of the community in the hands of the town authorities under God.

Mervyn James has usefully described this wider Corpus Christi festival of liturgy, procession, and drama as a complex performance affirming the hierarchic structure and corporate character of the community. James argues that, along with “enhancement of urban honor in the world at large, which most appealed to the urban magistracies,” the festival was a “mechanism … by which the tensions implicit in the diachronic rise and fall of occupational communities could be confronted and worked out. … [so that], by means which were essentially informal, … the implications of change could be given recognition and incorporated with a minimum of friction into the social body.” The semiotic and symbolic center which gave intellectual coherence to the whole festival complex was the Sacrament.