"My Life's Companion", or The Jeweler's Shop, part I - The Transfiguration of Time in the Experience of Love

In this and several following posts, I shall use my previous posts as a preamble to a theological reading of Pope John Paul II's The Jeweler's Shop, taking it as a phenomenology of love.

I spoke in a previous post of how the "theatre of the inner word" pares down the unessential distractions in a theatre so that the bare nakedness of the spoken Word could affect the audience directly by its own power.  As an example of this, John Paul II's The Jeweler's Shop paints in its words a phenomenological description of the experience of being in love, but theatrically transfiguring being, time, and the physical stage - those unessential distractions - in order to let the essence of love shine forth more directly and more clearly through the inner word, and by doing so he created a logos-like figure, the Jeweler, who is both a character in the play and the condition that renders the play possible.  I shall devote one post to the transfiguration of time in the service of experiencing love, another to the transfiguration of space and Wojtyla's treatment of the stage, a third post to the figure of the Jeweler, and a final post to the play's eschatological conclusion.

Instead of being a coherent story stuffed into a single place and a simple linear passage of time, The Jeweler’s Shop gets all of its unity from the aspect of eternity. Indeed, though the Brechtian emphasis on narration will become evident in the story's eschatological conclusion, there is no story per se, for what is important are not the ephemeral relationships between the characters, but rather their experience of love as their relationship to God and to those made in His image. Instead of being a story, the play is an extended phenomenology of love, in which each of the characters in turn reveals his own soul and by doing so reveals the greater reality of love in which it subsists. At the heart of this phenomenology, Wojtyla discovers time - kairos - as the ultimate reality within human love. In this respect, he may have been influenced by thinkers such as Heidegger and Bergson who had also come to the conclusion that man’s being is nothing other than time, but by giving a phenomenology of love rather than of being Wojtyla reaches his conclusion quite independently of previous thinkers. Wojtyla believed that time was redeemed and given its meaning by love, and that through love, time meets eternity - that love “cannot be a single moment; man’s eternity passes through it”. In the play, Teresa describes this conjunction between time and eternity by recalling the words with which Andrew had proposed to her.

We were just walking on the right side of the market square when Andrew turned around and said,
“Do you want to be my life’s companion?”
That’s what he said. He didn’t say: do you want to be my wife,
but: my life’s companion.　

It is in one’s life - one’s Da-sein - that time is found, and love defines one’s life. When a husband and wife are wedded, their love is eternal, as all the poets have known - but their love is also what time is made out of, as Wojtyla shows us. It is lack of love - especially in the form of unchastity - that turns meaningful time (kairos) into a meaningless succession of events. Pure kairos has nothing to do with the mere succession of events. Teresa could not recall what time it was when Andrew asked her to marry him; in a very real ontological sense, this was because there really was no time. In the inner world of the theatre, where pure kairos can be present without chronos, the meaningless and linear succession of events simply has no relevance. “At such moments one does not check the hour, such moments grow in one above time.”

On the other hand, when one falls in and out of love and changes lovers as his fancy suits him, he makes everyone incapable of being his “life’s companion”. It still remains possible to have a succession of sex partners, and even that indissoluble domestic arrangement officially known as marriage; but true matrimony - when the two become one flesh, as “life’s companion” to each other - becomes impossible. Each successive love affair makes mockery of the previous one, depriving it of all its meaning; as permanence is lost, consciousness of time - that is, of the possible dissolution of the love at a point some time in the future - makes it impossible for one to love the beloved in an altruistic manner. Such a lover is not loving the eternal soul of the beloved - which exists irrespective of chronological time, and which will never cease to exist - but is rather loving the soul as it exists, and only as it exists, now. To love with consciousness of time is to love a fleeting experience, and not an eternal soul - consciousness of time is almost unthinkable, for example, in the love between a mother and a son. Loving now is not ontological; it does not alter one’s being, only one’s emotions. True and real love completes the person; when the two become one flesh, they are no longer just themselves. After Teresa married Andrew, they existed no longer except in each other. Man is composed of an intellect, a will, and a body - thus in love, the bodies become one, the spouses know each other more intimately than it could be thought humanly possible, and most fundamentally, their wills are for nothing but each other. “Love - love pulsating in brows”, the chorus sings, “in man becomes thought and will: the will of Teresa being Andrew, the will of Andrew being Teresa.” An identity this close pertains to the essence of man, and is thus unchanging; it cannot be severed by material events such as death, for “love is stronger than death”. After Andrew was killed in the war, Teresa said “Andrew did not die in me, did not die on any front, he did not even have to come back, for somehow he is.” Presence, as Gabriel Marcel has told us, has nothing to do with physical location - bringing us to the phenomenological interconnectedness between time and presence and space, and to the subject of the next post.

Theology and Drama, part I

In the second part of his monumental magnum opus, Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote a "Theo-Drama"; that is, an examination of theology as couched in theatrical, dramatic terms as the story of salvation.  Though it would be a travesty to compare one blog post written in an afternoon by a young amateur to a five-volume series by one of the most preeminent theologians of the 20th century, my purpose in this post shall be a bit of the opposite of what von Balthasar was trying to do - instead of looking at theology viewed through the eyes of drama, I shall look at drama viewed through the eyes of theology; however, unlike von Balthasar's first series, The Glory of the Lord, I shall be looking at drama qua drama rather than at theological aesthetics per se.  In this post, I shall only be considering the general theory of the relationship between drama and theology, or more precisely a theological reading of drama, and use this as a prolegomenon for a subsequent post where I shall take a more detailed look at one piece of drama in particular, Blessed John Paul II's The Jeweler's Shop.

Though I said I would be looking at drama qua drama, in reality all fiction, all stories, are dramatic in nature, with their characters coming to life and playing their roles in the mind of the reader rather than on a physical stage.  Hence it would be more accurate to say that I am looking at literature qua drama, rather than the equally valid and insightful perspective of literature qua poetry.

One prominent aspect of drama that stands out in characterizing it is the presence of the audience.  All literature has its audience - its readers - but a piece of literature qua literature is meant to stand on its own; rather than a performance, when one discusses the literature one discusses the story and text abstracted from any physical reading or material situation.  Drama can be discussed in this same way, and the finest dramas - such as the works of Shakespeare - have no difficulty standing on their own as works of literature.  However, like poetry in its original state, drama is meant to be performed, raising the question of the audience.

Different playwrights have accorded different roles to the audience.  In classical drama the audience is a mere spectator; the play could be performed just as well without them.  Awareness of the audience took on a much bigger role with the advent of postmodernism and liminal theatre.  Audience participation began to become part of the show, giving the actors - now more like buffoonish clowns than serious characters - feedback and direction on their improv shticks, and likewise the actors would take an active role critiquing and involving their audience in their show.  I recall attending production once of a play entitled "The Complete History of America, Abridged" when the actress (playing a soldier during World War I) soaked the entire audience with a child's "Super-Soaker" water gun.  In similar fashion, actors in Philip Glass' opera "Einstein on the Beach" would make an implicit point about the tardiness of their audience by beginning half an hour before the show was scheduled to begin so that the audience arrived in media res, and metatextual jabs at the text's own status as a construct became a staple of postmodern literature, for example in Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Obviously, neither extreme - the reduction of the audience to mere spectator and the buffoonish reduction of literature to metatextual awareness - are fitting models for the type of drama encapsulated in the Divine Liturgy, which makes present to us a serious story with very real and serious characters, but in which the congregation is hardly a passive "audience".  Following the reasoning that the critical theory which will elucidate the theological aspect of drama the most is that which describes best the dramatic nature of theology and of the Liturgy, I will turn to Bertrold Brecht's critical theory to lay the groundwork for the theological elucidation of a play in my next post.

Turning to Brecht is not entirely my own idea; in doing so I am following the venerable Fr. Geoffrey Preston, O.P., in his posthumously edited Faces of the Church.  Brecht was a Marxist, not a Christian, and arrived at his ideas for different reasons than Christian hermeneutics would.  Brecht turned away from the introspective psychological turn that had characterized literature since the Romantic period, and come to an extreme in the Modernist period with James Joyce and Marcel Proust, where story-telling took as its object only the labyrinthine paths of the human subconscious, with external relations taking a secondary role.  This is equally useless for both Christian soteriology and Marxist dialectic, for the obvious reason that both Christianity and Marxism are corporeal soteriologies.  Brecht restored the primacy of the story to his plays, writing only plays which were truly narrative in character.

The narrative emphasis in Brecht led him to shift our view of the role of an actor.  Whereas in classical theatre whose consummation came in the form of cinema sought for its actors to maintain an illusion of becoming their characters in the audience's mind and identifying as strongly as possible with their characters, Brecht argued instead than actor's job is not to identify with a character, but to narrate his story, to act in his person rather than to imitate his action, and to communicate this story to the audience rather than just make the story come to life on the stage irrespective of whether anyone is watching or not.  Just as the priest's job is to make Calvary mystically present to us rather than to be another Jim Caviezel, the purpose of an actor in Brechtian theatre is to make a story present to us, not to imitate the characters.

Using Brecht as a pointer to start us off, we can pursue a theological dramatic theory by next asking the question how an actor as narrator conveys this story to the audience in a dramatic rather than sacramental way.  Because drama and sacrament are analogous acts, the manner of communication is analogous - the connection between the audience and the actor occurs through the word, the uncreated Word of God in the latter case, and what the Polish director and critic Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk called the "inner word" in the former case.  In scholastic theology, the "inner word" is that act of understanding which emanates from the Logos, or Eternal Word; by attempting to convey the inner word directly, the intellectus (or the “eye of the heart” as Orthodox tradition following St. Basil calls it) would be spoken to immediately instead of through the manipulation of the passions. The truths thus expressed would be both perfectly subjective and perfectly objective.

Kotlarczyk was the mentor of the young playwright Karol Wojtyla, the future John Paul II, and like his more famous mentor was heavily influenced by the Polish Romantic poets such as Adam Mickiewicz and Cyprian Norwid.  However, according to Rocco Buttiglione (Karol Wojtyla:  The Thought of the Man who became Pope John Paul II, pp. 21 ff.), Kotlarczyk was also influenced heavily by Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, which in the tradition of magic and witchcraft believed heavily in the power of the spoken word.  Unlike Blavatsky, however, Kotlarczyk was a devout Christian, and for him the word was not a means of attaining power over creation, but an attribute of divinity, the means by which God created the world, and by which God affects and sanctifies the soul.  Seeking to purify theatre of all distractions in order to find the purest medium for conveying the Word, Kotlarczyk introduced his "theatre of the inner word", in which - devoid almost entirely of action, props, costumes, and other conventional methods - the bare nakedness of the spoken Word could affect the soul directly by its own power.