The Western tradition of theater comes from the Greek tradition of theater, where art is directly connected to the worship of the gods. From the fifth century B.C., the Greeks used theater as public worship. These were grand performances, solemn, larger than life. The theaters would seat 15,000. The art was perfected at the annual spring festivals devoted to Dionysus, the god of fertility and wine. A competition was held, and three playwrights were invited to write a tragedy in three one-act plays, followed by a single act comedy. For three successive days during the festival, each playwright’s plays were performed and ten judges selected the best work. There was no higher honor than to win this competition. Sophocles won this competition several times. Aristotle praises Oedipus Rex as a model of what tragedy should be. Greek theater died with the end of the empire and there would not be another golden age of theater until the beginning of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England, up to the glory of Shakespeare. The Mass inspired the revival of this tradition of theater. The medieval Corpus Christi plays are an example of this inspiration. Once again, theater is used as worship.
Following upon his introduction to O’Neill in his first lecture, Dr. White examines the nature of O’Neill’s play and discusses both its elements and O’Neill’s approach from a number of angles. As an American with a Catholic sense but, in effect, without the Catholic faith, O’Neill’s essentially auto-biographical play reveals all the contradictions, conflicts, and essential despair characteristic of O’Neill’s personal life and his existence as an American. On the plus side, he knows renaissance drama and the “unities” – one setting, one action, one day’s time – are apparent in his work. At the same time, his play partakes of the inherent tragedy of American political and religious life. Hounded by the Faith, O’Neill spends his life running from it. In an interesting sideline, Dr. White discusses the famous American Catholic Dorothy Day and her understanding of O’Neill: “He portrayed more than any other what life with God is like.” Though he knew from memory, and could recite with energy and drama, Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, he never let God’s pursuit come to fruition. As always, Dr. White’s explication of this particular work of literature carries with it many insightful aphorisms gleaned from his sweeping and expansive knowledge of the panorama of American and Western literature as a whole. “Dead children haunt American drama”; O’Neill’s work, like so many other American productions, is full of people almost literally dying to go to confession; America, as revealed by her greatest artists, is a failed nation that compromised with materialism, as did many of the artists themselves. Still, the Catholic sense seeps through, such that, to cite just one example, O’Neill’s work is obsessed with the past, and in this respect is eminently traditional rather than modern or progressive.
In this sweeping introduction to O’Neill’s work as an American dramatist, Dr. White argues the relevance and even necessity of understanding literature, history, and Catholicism in order to appreciate the significance of O’Neill’s play. Explaining that O’Neill was the creator of a genuine American drama, White also suggests that he could not have done so without his Catholicism, nor, the doctor provocatively maintains, without losing it. This introduction to O’Neill is consequently a tour de force review of the history of the interaction between Americanism, Modernism, and Catholicism on the cultural, literary, and artistic battlefields of the beleaguered nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Dr. White describes “The Temple of the Holy Ghost” as a gentle piece of work punctuated, however, with grotesque elements. He characterizes O’Connor as a great Catholic artist of our own time and extols this story as one of her few, if not only, openly Catholic works. The title, according to White, speaks to the essence of “matter” and “spirit.”
Here Dr. White makes passing reference to O’Connor’s affection for the films of W.C. Fields, as he segues into a discussion of “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” White characterizes this story as frightening, and one in which O’Connor presents an empty, dead world wherein she deals with intellectual pride and the racism of the deep South in a bygone era.
The world into which Evelyn Waugh was born was in turmoil. Born in 1903, he was a child during WWI. England after the war was changed markedly by the abandonment of God and replaced with materialism. Civilization had become bankrupt. His artistic sense compelled him to search for understanding, a deeper meaning. School, work, marriage, painting, writing were helps and distractions. His intellectual pursuit continued. In 1930 at the age of 26 he completed his intellectual search with the aid of a patient priest, and became a Catholic. He now could make sense of the world and write about it with clarity. Waugh wrote: “Civilization, and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe has not in its self the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. It is no longer possible as it was in the time of Gibbon to accept the benefits of civilization, and at the same time to deny the supernatural basis on which it rests. Christianity is in greater need of combative strength than it has been for centuries.”
