The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre by David V. Mason

Author:David V. Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

Heinrich further amplified Mechthild’s own call for imitatio.

He set passages [from Mechthild’s book] into a framework that called for replication and performance. To that end, he interspersed Latin titles, lines from the mass, and ritual directions. He suggested that [Margaret] try Mechthild’s flights… . Heinrich clearly set out the experiences of the exemplar Mechthild … as definitive activities for practicing techniques to propel the soul out of the flesh into the contemplation of God.59

Margaret’s subsequent experiments with her baby Jesus figure were not only imitatio Mariae, but also, as Beckman asserts, imitatio Mechthild.60 The experience of god that followed from her own practice presented itself in Margaret’s senses as an unconstrained flow, modo in Mechthild, transcending the Church’s mediation. In their practice, the nuns could personally experience Mechthild as a spiritual, mimic-able ideal, and partly thanks to Heinrich, they had an order of action and consequence that they could follow with anticipation of arriving at a commensurate conclusion, no less than the very experience, in imminent, bodily presence, that the text, per se, only represents.61 Hence, Ebner could carry on conversations with her wood figure of the baby Jesus and even feel the figure nursing at her breast.62

The Sundénian construal of role theory would acknowledge the Mary role that Christian scripture proffered nuns like Ebner, as well as the Mechthild role that the mystic’s book, via Heinrich, added to the tradition. Because the cohort of nuns of which Ebner was a part assimilated Mechthild’s book and its reading into a repeatable system, in their own bodies, of prayer and prostration – practices they already understood, already felt, as acts of piety – their heterodox and embodied combination of veneration and devotional recitation of Mechthild’s book exposed Church ritual metatheatrically, wrenching open a space in which they could generate extra- or even anti-structural structures. Ebner, in body, acted in accord with what that rupture of reality made possible and activated an organization of expectations that included, already, god’s activity. Ebner’s perceptive faculties tilted toward intuiting the way in which divinity would make itself present. The role play was comprised, then, of twofold playing: Ebner adopted the maternal-mystic role, and, in the imaginative effort of perceiving the god presence at which the narratively organized pattern must arrive, the nun simultaneously took the role of divinity. The consequence of playing the part and its parts was the extension of the “Christian” composition of reality, known irrefutably by and in Ebner’s own body. No wonder that McNamer characterizes the sort of performance that had such power in the late-medieval period as “serious, practical work.”63

Medieval imitatio was not Aristotelian mimesis. Margaret Ebner’s experience of herself as the personally beloved and favored of god rested in heightened, unfalsifiably felt experience that attended her doing of intimate interaction with god. In that so transformative performance, self and reality, the human activity that involves reference – which the study of theatre, ritual, and the like, commonly reduces to “symbolic action” – did not merely refer to what was not present.

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