A blue whale made its stately way around the stage, and a pair of desperate dodos arrived too late for the Ark. The arches of York Minster rang with the clash of steel as Archangel Michael and his legions took on the hosts of hell. Pontius Pilate was distracted from an amorous interlude with news of a tiresome ecclesiastical quarrel. Roman soldiers made ribald jokes as they went about the routine business of crucifixion, the Bethlehem shepherds danced with their sheep, and a formidable Mrs Noah handbagged her husband to within an inch of his life.
The York Mystery Plays, staged this year, bring the spirit of illuminated manuscripts to life. They belong to an age that carved grinning demons on churches and filled missals with imaginary beasts. An age that elected boy bishops at Christmas for 12-day feasts of misrule, and inspired men of the most disreputable conduct to take the pilgrim’s road to Canterbury.
In the 7th century, the Gospels could be entirely rewritten to catch the imagination of glory-seeking Saxon thanes; by the 13th, the Church had transformed the descendants of those thanes into monks of war, opened her arms to the pagan philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and conferred sainthood on a man who talked to wolves.
The plays paint Christianity onto a canvas as big as the world, unafraid to draw on anything within their authors’ experience. Sacred or profane, bawdy or solemn, real or imaginary, biblical or apocryphal, everything is potentially raw material. No plaster pieties obscure the essential humanity of the characters. Neighbours, friends and enemies become prophets, saints and wise men. They were, after all, just like us once.
Watching the Plays, you’re watching the story of your own life, your own world. Earth, heaven and hell are laid out before your eyes. The solemn grandeur of the Creation, full of the fresh immanent wonder of birds, beasts and planets, is still vivid in your memory when God pronounces the earth has passed away. A thing that seemed eternal is suddenly fleeting.
At the Last Judgment, Christ speaks the words of the Parable of the Judgment in St Matthew’s Gospel. When I was hungry, you fed me. The words bring compassion into the otherwise stark sternness of medieval Dooms, which can show only the fate of the damned and the blessed. As you watch, it’s hard not to be aware that you will be one of those souls on stage, destined for good or for ill. Angels and demons are everywhere, from Pilate’s marital bed to the Garden of Gethsemane, to guide or warn or tempt.
The programme offered the now apparently obligatory reference to how the Reformation replaced a more artistically rich form of Christianity with one “plainer and more democratic”. This simply isn’t true. The plays (among many other medieval practices) offered the laity far richer and more varied opportunities of participation than anything later centuries offered – on either side of the confessional divide.
Staging the plays in the Middle Ages transformed illiterate labourers into catechists. Mounting one of the 48 individual plays in the York cycle took the efforts of a whole guild and reached an entire city. Far from being shut out by a hieratic priesthood, the laity could take biblical raw material and bring it to life in their own lively, idiosyncratic and occasionally irreverent way. By no stretch of the imagination can sermons on the Epistles of St Paul be characterised as somehow more authentically “popular”.
Modern Catholicism has much to learn from the animating spirit of the Mystery Plays: so charged with whimsy, playfulness, and laughter, so heedless of boundaries. We can remember that drawing gorgeous doodles in the margins of Gospels (the Book of Kells), or studying the life-cycle of vultures (St Albert the Great) are also expressions of our faith.
None of us is exempt from the words of the Parable of the Judgment – the plays make that quite clear. But they also remind us to work for the glory of God such that those comforting the sick, oppressed and dying can say: “Look, there’s more to life than this!” To draw dragons in missals and carve grotesques on buildings. To make people laugh or soar or weep. To bring forth joy and wonder, so that those whose eyes are closing for the last time have experienced brightness, beauty and whimsy as well as kindness and love. To create things which are neither messages nor calls to action, but simply the exercise of our gifts for creation and play. God delighted in the world he made, and so should we.
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