To Begin and End with a Marvel

Since class on Monday, I have been thinking about Emile Male’s perspective on the marvelous and its place in biblical storytelling, particularly in relation to the Nativity episodes of the York Mystery Plays.  As Professor Fulton Brown drew attention to during lecture, Male insists upon a clear distinction between canon and apocrypha, and how each is categorized in the medieval mind and approached by the medieval artist.  The apocrypha, or “popular legend,” are for Male associated with all things exotic; he gives this account of their genesis:

Marvellous legends arose, born no doubt among the fellahs and watermen of the Nile and brought by caravans to Palestine, and later to the heart of Arabia… Some chapters in the apocryphal gospels are like the Life of Apollonius of Tyana or even like the Golden Ass, permeated with the belief in witchcraft and magic, for the credulous eastern peoples made these legends in their own image.

(The Gothic Image, 206-207)

The canon and its representations, however, he characterizes in a radically different way.  These correspond with “theological teaching” (202) and factual simplicity.  As he says, “The scene of the Nativity as conceived by the thirteenth century first of all puts before us the simple historic fact” (202). Thus he recycles for us a classic east-west dichotomy - the logical rigor belongs to Caesar, the romantic lassitude to Antony.  Though both come together in the Middle Ages, Male would have it that canonical stories are dealt with on strictly theological terms, whereas popular legend alone, “the people’s naive dreams” (202), was permissive of the marvelous.

However, I noticed that in the dramatic episodes that deal with Christ’s birth (“simple historical fact,” in Male’s words), language of knowledge and inquiry and language of marvel both appear frequently, and alongside each other.  Words of knowing and asking are pervasive, with some form of the verb “witen” (to know) appearing constantly throughout the plays.  The scenes we read are full of people who want to know, who say what it is they know and what it is they don’t, people who seek and inquire.  And yet almost if not just as often, characters marvel and declare things strange.

The birth of Christ is in fact the marvel towards which all questioning directs itself, on which claims of knowing or not knowing focus.  Joseph’s desperate and incredulous questioning is followed by the earnest seeking of the three kings, overlapped by Herod’s own angry desire to find out if these things are true, whether a king shall be born greater than he, who shall “govern all that on earth grows” (“Herod and the Magi,” 220). Joseph calls his newly born son a “selcouth sight” (“The Nativity,” 94) (selcouth meaning literally “rarely known”; something remarkable) and “marvels” (92) at Him.  Herod upon hearing news of the birth calls it a “wonder thing” (“Herod and The Magi, 173), and the three kings themselves use this adjective “selcouth” a number of times to describe the event.  All these words speak to something outside ordinary human experience, something that is wondrous and cannot be fully grasped by the human mind.  And yet, this marvel is the only response to the questions in the plays.  Joseph comes to Mary claiming to know certain things - that he has not been with her, and evidence and nature would show that she has betrayed him.  But he is answered only with “selcouth tidings” (“Joseph’s Trouble about Mary,” 161),  which in the end both supersede his logic and resolve his questions. The three kings are also seeking, with deeper understanding than Joseph, wanting to know the meaning of a sign.  Persistently following a star, they wonder “What selcouth thing it shall signify” (“Herod and the Magi,” 74); one vows he will not stop “Till I the cause may clearly con” (85), and another is sure it has “Some point thereof to prove” (102).  Herod’s own questions are added to these in the following scene. All of these people have their own reasons for asking, and the nature of their questions are different (how and who, what does it mean, where, and is it really so), but they meet at the same place.  Above all in these plays the birth of Christ is portrayed as an answer, toward which all the questions are converging.  It seems a particularly telling moment, then, when Joseph comes onto the scene after the birth of Jesus, and beholding the child, asks of his wife, “Oh Mary, what sweet thing is that on thy knee?” (“The Nativity,” 87). Of course he knows she must have given birth to her son, but in this crucial moment, the question does not come from any real confusion, but rather enforces the role Jesus has played throughout the drama - He is the infant that does not speak but is somehow the answer to all the questions, the Word.  

The part Christ plays as answer in the action of the play is paralleled (or rather, deepened) by his role as the fulfillment of prophecy, which Mary, Joseph, and the three kings all recognize openly at different points.  He is the end of predictions of a savior, the completion of Old Testament symbols, the event that all signs pointed to.  Indeed throughout the Nativity plays there is striking imagery and language of the sign and signified collapsing onto one another.  The angel Gabriel when appearing to Joseph calls the birth itself the “token right” (“Joseph’s Trouble about Mary,” 277); while the three kings have been pursuing the star as a sign, in speaking with Herod they name Christ Himself that star (“Herod and The Magi,” 215); when Joseph comes upon Mary and the newly born Jesus, he is led by the shining light of the star, and as he gazes upon the Son of God, the light and the infant have become confused, and it is unclear which he is really seeing (“Me marvels mickle of this light/That thusgates shines in this place” - “The Nativity,” 92-3).  The circle has been closed, the meaning has at last come to complete the signs.

Crucially this fulfillment is also the source of all things.  None of the holy figures within the plays forget that the child born is the Maker of the world and them. In her first moments with Him, Mary salutes Him, “Hail, through whose might/All this world was first begun” (“The Nativity,” 61-2), and Joseph calls Him “my maker” (108) and names him “root of all right… leamer of light” (109, 111). The third king calls him “well of wit” (“Herod and The Magi,” 391), fount of wisdom.  Thus, this “selcouth thing” stands at either end of the human story; it is at the center of inquiry and wisdom, it is the completion of prophecy, and the beginning of things.  It creates and then recreates through redemption.  All questions are answered by this "wonder thing," and reality rests on a marvel - the perfect intersection of God and man, the Creator inside creation.  Contrary to Male’s dichotomy, it would seem that in the medieval mind the marvelous is in fact the truest expression of the real, the most absolute form of being.  This vision of the world was reflected in our opening discussion on Monday, in the way the medieval calendars measured time by holy feasts, and understood scenes from their everyday lives therein; by doing so they mapped their ordinary experience onto the extraordinary.  It is reflected in the putting on of the plays, the way the craft guilds aligned themselves with the Creator by projecting their own creative occupation onto the one true creation story.  And it is reflected in the city of York itself, and so many others across Europe, where the town lies at the knees of the cathedral, this wondrous image of heaven which towers above all else.  

 

(York Minster, my photo.  Taken July 2018)

Sources

Male, Emile.  The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century.  New York: Harper & Row, 1958.  

Beadle, Richard and Pamela King, ed.  York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.