Here is how the Pope spent Maundy Thursday:
Le pape François a lavé jeudi les
pieds de douze détenus, dont deux jeunes filles, dans une prison de Rome. Un
geste sans précédent.
The press made a big deal out of how some of the prisoners
whose feet the Holy Father washed, were women -- as though everyone involved
were Salafi.
In the section of readers’ comments, Christians ‘got it’,
whereas a couple of baffled agnostics worried whether, by this action the Pope
were being “soft on crime”. (The
fingers twitch, itching to add an editorial “[sic!]”: but in fact, on reflection, there is a kind of truth in this
view. But it is not a truth
of the marketplace, nor indeed of this world.)
The foot-washing ceremony is not really doctrinal: it is exemplary and physical. When Jesus did it, it prefigured that
final physical act of grace, the sharing of the bread and wine, commemorated in
Communion.
Crime, like war and pestilence, and all the other woes of
this vale, are concerning; yet
Christ and his church are after bigger game : Sin. This
distinction is signally illustrated that supreme scene of all our literature,
in which Jean Valjean, having been hosted to dinner by the Bishop, makes off
with the silver tableware; is
caught, and hauled back to the Bishop’s dwelling in custody. “Ah, so glad to see you again, my
friend!” cries the Bishop, to the amazement of the constables. “You forgot the candletsticks!”
Only in the shallowest view was the Bishop being ‘soft on crime’: He had spotted in Jean Valjean
something much worse than any crime:
a soul in peril. On the usurer’s balance-pan, the Bishop’s
act makes no sense; but it had a
transcendent sense -- it gave sense to a life that erst had lacked it.
~
All this leads us to the mystery of Mercy -- and thence, to
the Merchant of Venice.
Some choice passages of Theodore Reik would here be in point,
but the volume lies not to hand.
The upshot, if memory serves, was that, although Shakespeare wore very
lightly whatever religion he may
have had, he grew up in an England steeped with Christian legend if not
theology, and may have been influenced by it here; and that we are to take the play (whether Shakespeare
himself so intended it or not) as a serious confrontation between Judaism and
Christianity. Our only point
in raising this here, is to angle back in on the mystical import of the Pope’s gesture (so strange to the
unchurched). In light of
this, we are not really practicing textual criticism here, so much as
suggesting a possible staging of the play.
The Merchant is of course a painful puzzle for the modern metteur en scène: No
one wishes to appear anti-Semitic.
Do you downplay Shylock’s Jewishness? Do you insert apologetic mumblings into the program notes?
The reading (or staging) that I suggest, confronts this
question in a way that has nothing whatever to do with political
correctness: that of not playing down, but playing up Shylock’s Jewish faith and ancestry, playing it up to its full
and mighty stature, whose long shadow has ever lain across the world.
That Shylock could be a money-lender, followed from
well-known sociohistorical reasons;
the status neither shocks a modern audience, inured as we are to the
world of promiscuous high finance, nor has it any theological
significance: it simply is perfect
for the plot. That Jews in the
Middle Ages were the ones who must finance the follies of the Gentiles, is
historically amusing, but does not go to the heart of Moses, nor of
Abraham. The covenant of
Abraham, and the laws brought down by Moses, are the rock upon which all that
was later solid rests. Shylock, as such, should not be
edulcorated, and he needs no excuses. He is (or, let us depict him as) a pillar of Old
Testament rectitude. In
insisting upon the force and vigor of his bond with Antonio (for the Jews well
know about bonds, as well as bondage), he is as righteous in his way, as the
cadi ordering the amputation of thieving hands. Basanio -- the feckless debtor whose follies set the
whole thing in motion -- is callow by comparison. (Were I to stage the play, he would be played by one of the
Monty Pythons.)
Shylock movingly depicts the plight and trials of his long-oppressed people; but when it comes to the case in point,
he needs no lawyer’s rhetoric or tricks:
he has the law on his side. Portia herself admits the literal justice of
Shylock’s claim, by all the judicial reasonings of this world.
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