From
The March 2002 St John's Eagle
Enter
Herod, Raging
In
his sermon for the feast of the Epiphany, the rector noted that while Herod is
mentioned in the gospel (Matt 2), he is almost never visually presented to us
in the nativity scenes that adorn our churches. Yet the student of medieval drama
will find this omission curious, since Herod was easily the dominant figure in
the mystery-cycles that were mounted each year in the major cities of Britain.
These presentations often occurred simultaneously with the celebration of Corpus
Christi, which featured an outdoor procession and which generally came at a lull
between spring planting and the first harvesting of the new crops. The church
devised the cycles as an annual review of sacred history, in the vernacular, beginning
with the creation and proceeding on to the last judgment. Each guild was assigned
a segment of the story; each prepared a pageant wagon, somewhat like a float in
our time, which rumbled in sequence through the narrow streets of a medieval city.
Stopping at each major square, each pageant-wagon presented its playlet, then
moved on to repeat it in another location. The total drama could take several
days to unfold.
In the episode devoted to the Magi and the Holy Innocents, Herod first appears,
strutting about on his stage, boasting of quasi-divine power. He receives the
Magi and orders them to return to him after they have found the Christ-child.
Later in the playlet, when they fail to report to him, Herod flies into a rage
and indulges in the most scurrilous language and violent threats of reprisal.
He even comes down from his float and roars among the audience, scaring the children
half to death.
Shakespeare as a boy may have seen this depiction of a king beside himself with
anger. Hamlet condemns popular actors for "out-Heroding Herod." One
of my professors at Brown referred to this role as the first "heavy"
in the history of English drama (although a case might be made for Cain, who,
in an earlier playlet indulged in violent language and still more violent behavior
that have echoes down to our own time in the expression "to raise Cain").
Why did the mystery-cycles stop being produced? Why did so powerful a character
as Herod drop from the repertory? Probably because, by the late sixteenth century,
sophisticated humanist scholars laughed at such crude folk-productions, and Protestant
reformers suppressed the cycles because they contained so much non-Biblical material.
Still, Herod remains to this day an important part of the Christmas story.
Herod the king. Herod as a supreme personification of the arrogance of power —
and of its essential silliness. The image, if not the name, remains alive in our
culture. I recall in the 1930s how amused we were when the newsreels recorded
Hitler's posturing in the Nuremberg stadium. Charlie Chaplin drew upon this image
in The Great Dictator although with a somber ending after all the comedy. But
we could no longer laugh as the evidence for the Holocaust burst upon us, and
no one, so far as I know, has found comic potential in Stalin or in Osama bin
Laden. The arrogance of power has become our nightmare. Yet sometimes it may be
helpful to remember also its absurdity. A man claiming to be more than man can
be lethal to countless numbers of human beings. He is also ultimately absurd.
So why is there no Herod in our Epiphany scenes? As I have suggested in previous
columns, we have sentimentalized our religion, purging it of all representations
of the horror of reality. Our children once sang a hymn praising God "for
dogs with friendly faces." A curate at St. John's asked pointedly, "But
what about the other kind?"
Herod belongs in the story. Can some member of the parish carve or mold a raging
Herod to stand behind the Magi in our crèche?
Evil, deadly even if ridiculous, should be part of our perception of reality.
The Holy Innocents were really murdered, their mothers really grieved. They are
an essential part of the human story.
