Paul Thelakat
Michael Bakhtin once remarked, “The gospel, too, is carnival”; incarnation, creativity and aesthetic love inspire him to make such a statement. It is referring to Bakhtin’s The Work of Francois Rabelais and Popular Culture of the Middle Ages, that he makes such a remark. Carnival is the invention of Medieval Christian faith and practise in Europe. Laughter was the essence of the Carnival, in contrast to all encompassing seriousness; it was directed at the whole world, at history, at all societies, at ideology. It was the victory of laughter over fear that plagued the medieval man. Laughter was not only a victory over mystic terror of God, but also a victory over the awe inspiring forces of nature, and most of all over the oppression and guilt related to all that was consecrated and forbidden taboos. Laughter brought about the fall of divine and human power, of authoritarian commandments and prohibitions, of death and hell and all that is more terrifying than the earth itself. To deride and laugh at was the last weapon of the ordinary men and women of the medieval feudalistic society and its subjugating structures. It was the first instance of a liberation of the spirit universally directed against the captivity of the human spirit as such, its enslavement to fear. For the medieval parodist, everything without exception was comic.
Rabelais as an artist must have indeed had strong reservations about the church as an institution wielding power; it would be wrong to categorise him as necessarily anti-Christian on those grounds. The Medieval Carnival was not an anti-Christian movement, nor was it an atheistic celebration. It was indeed a festival arising from people’s faith in Christ. Whilst there is no doubt that Bakhtin believes Rabelais to be subjecting the medieval religious outlook to mockery in Gargantua and Pantagruel; he is careful not to describe him as an atheist in our contemporary sense of the word. Rabelais’ religion is wider and deeper-rooted. It ignores all intolerant seriousness, all dogmatism. His view of the world is neither pure negation nor pure affirmation. The parody of biblical texts is not to be taken as an abstract rationalist atheism, but as a humorous corrective of all unilateral seriousness. Rabelais is portrayed as a writer whose goal is ultimately not to subject individual targets to ridicule in a narrow or tendentious way, but to promote the spirit of carnival in general, to bathe the whole cosmos in the tonic of laughter.
His artistic thought points to passages in Gargantua and Pantagruel whose discourse comprises almost entirely of serious speech: Apart from official seriousness, the seriousness of power, terrifying and intimidating seriousness, there is also an unofficial seriousness of suffering, fear, cowardice and weakness, the seriousness of the slave. The craving for a change and absolute renewal, the protest against dissolution into the whole. There is a sound philosophical value to carnival festivity. No rest period or breathing spell can be rendered festive per se; something must be added from the spiritual and ideological dimension. They must be sanctioned not by the world of practical conditions, but by the highest aims of human existence, that is, by the world of ideals. Without this sanction there can be no festivity
Gadamer says, “Celebrating is an art that we have lost.” I believe that we have lost the art of designing spaces that invite celebration. For Gadamer, celebration means, first of all, not allowing separation between one person and another, designing a church as a welcoming space. St Gregory of Nyssa allows no separation between one person and another. Christians gather together in the name of God to enact liturgically a “festival address” that sometimes requires a profound silence from the listeners. We have to be concerned with, so to speak, alienating verbosity. Carnivalistic thought lives in the realm of ultimate questions, but it gives them no abstractly philosophical or religiously dogmatic solution; it plays them out in the concretely sensuous form of carnivalistic acts and images. Again, the carnival philosophy of death and renewal is not an abstract thought, but a living sense of the world. Indeed, Christianity, at its inception, may be viewed as nothing other than a God taking flesh, and a degradation, a debasement of the entire Old Testament world-view. In the Incarnation, heaven is brought down to earth; ahistorical, metaphysical truths enter into the realm of spatial and temporal limitation and possibility and are thereby divested of their power to distance and to terrify the believer.
Jesus is Immanuel, God with us according to Isaiah (7.14; Matthew 1.23). He was certainly aware of this aspect of the Incarnation and placed a positive interpretation upon it. Christ as the means by which God ceases to be an abstract principle: even God had to be incarnated in order to show mercy, to suffer and forgive, to come down, as it were, from the abstract viewpoint of justice. A living truth is an embodied truth, a word made flesh. In becoming Man, Christ saves God from the necessary neutrality of a disembodied consciousness and allows him to participate fully in the world. To incarnate is to go down from oneself. In Christ the transcendent God becomes immanent. In self-denial I realise, in a maximally active way and in full, the uniqueness of my place in being. His kenotic act of condescension, his taking on of mortal flesh, is the great symbol of activity. The human subject’s responsible act of transcending his or her own boundaries to engage with the world is going out. Clearly, this is closely linked with Christ’s act of Incarnation, described as going down. To enter history is to incarnate.
The materialising principle that informs the gospels and is epitomised by the Incarnation overthrows a religion based on absence and fear in favour. The high, spiritual, ideal, abstract philosophy of late Temple Judaism is transformed by Christ into a carnivalesque, experiential thinking. The Incarnation motif in the carnival is a vigorous crusade against negative attitudes to the body generally. We have to return both a language and a meaning to the body. It is possible to have in contrast to this a Gospel whose organising centre is the `Word made flesh’ dwelling among us. Jesus may be said to represent the perfect reconciliation of language with the body as he is the Word of life whom the first epistle of John describes as `That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched’ (I John 1.1). The antipathy to disembodied world-views and advocacy of the sensual philosophy of carnival, far from alienating him from Christianity, may actually be informed by certain aspects of it, aspects which offer a compelling model for combining ideology with physicality, and discourse the word with the deed.
Is the fundamental ethos of the Gospels one of Rabelaisian carnival? Indeed, it is hard to see how one might cast the Gospels in the form of the humorous without making a mockery of their self-evidently serious tone. The answer to this question lies in the existence of a strong conceptual bond between laughter and the motif of Christian love, or agape. For in the New Testament the liberating, fear-destroying principle is love: `There is no fear in love. Man who fears is not made perfect in love’ (I John 4.18). One might thus speak of a ‘carnival love’ of the gospels. Laughter is an alternative way of seeing the world, which has as great a claim to philosophical value as its `serious’ counterparts; it is one of the essential forms of truth concerning the world as a whole, concerning history and man. Laughter liberates one not only from external censorship, but first of all from the great interior censor; it liberates one from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years: fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power. Fear is the extreme expression of narrow-minded and stupid seriousness, which is defeated by laughter. Complete liberty is possible only in the completely fearless world. Turning to the Gospels with the above in mind, one is forcibly struck by the dominating presence of three out of the four elements of laughter, truth, freedom, fearlessness matrix; only laughter is missing. Jesus’ radical message of liberty and truth. “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free” (John 8.32). Goethe’s poem `Nature’: Its crown is love. Only through love can we draw near to it. It has placed abysses between creatures, and all creatures long to merge in the universal embrace. It divides them, in order to bring them together. It atones for a whole life of suffering, by the mere pressing of lips to the cup of life. It is absolute goodness. With the introduction of love into the picture: Physical life… enters a new sphere of being. Life gains recognition from without, outside of itself, concluding that `Hell is life outside of love’. Jesus Christ fulfils this role of unsophisticated goodness, lifting life out of its rut into a sphere of being not a prey to a constant and destructive power struggle. The kind of love first prioritised by him is laughter’s cousin and coalition partner in opposition to the governing forces of the cosmic order. Carnival can exist only as an authorised transgression, or else it becomes plain revolution. In this sense, comedy and carnival are not instances of real transgressions: In the fool the novelist finds a form to portray the mode of existence of a man who is in life, but not of it, life’s perpetual spy and reflector. Carnival’s language of symbolic and sensuous forms cannot be translated in any full or adequate way into a verbal language. It can be transposed into the language of literature. Art was nothing but regarding the world in a state of grace: illumination. Art reveals God who is behind all things. The flesh speaks in us rather than that we do speak it. It snatches us up like the sensible world. The invisible, mind you, is not another positivity: it is the inverse, or the other side of the visible.
Jesus Christ crucified is on the cross with regal name plate over his head as a tragic and comic figure laughing at the world. Jesus Christ allegorically becomes the clown figure: The clown and the fool represent a metamorphosis of Caesar and God. The transformed figures are located in the nether world, in death. Christ’s passion is the analogous feature of the metamorphosis of God or ruler into slave, criminal or fool. Clearly, Jesus is the fool protagonist of the Gospels and the physically absent yet all-pervasive organising idea of the biblical texts that exercises an enormous influence over the bible’s readership. One example of the individual image-bearer of Christ is St. Francis of Assisi: `Francis called himself and his companions “God’s jugglers’’ (ioculatores Domini).
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