1 - Dramatizing theology

Summary

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita …

(dante, Inferno, line 1)

Like Dante, we are bound to take up the interpretative task from a position always already ‘in the middle’ of life. We are always already players in the movement of this drama.

In his celebrated meditation on a public execution and the crowd which gathers around to see it, Michel Foucault also articulates this condition of all our interpretative endeavours. ‘The eternal game’, he writes, ‘has already begun.’ The drama of life and death displayed on and around the scaffold invites us to consider this fact in a particularly concentrated way. It prompts us to ask with a certain urgency how we are to read this ‘eternal game’, when we do not have a clear view of where its beginnings were, and what its true end ought to be. Some gain from the experience a glimpse of justice and some of martyrdom, some an intimation of paradise and some of damnation. There is, as Foucault says:

an ambiguity in this suffering that may signify equally well the truth of the crime or the error of the judges, the goodness or the evil of the criminal, the coincidence or the divergence between the judgement of men and that of God. Hence the insatiable curiosity that drove the spectators to the scaffold to witness the spectacle of sufferings truly endured; there one could decipher crime and innocence, the past and the future, the here below and the eternal. It was a moment of truth that all the spectators questioned: each word, each cry, the duration of the agony, the resisting body, the life that clung desperately to it, all this constituted a sign.