The Passion of Christ and the Melodramatic Imagination

Description

In the 9th century, a more human Christ began to replace images of the judgmental, majestic Christ. Most visible in artistic depictions of the Passion of Christ, the human Christ is shown meekly enduring unbearable agony at the hands of villainous persecutors, his torments witnessed by the lamenting Marys and Saint John (Mâle 1986). In turn, these mourners model the faithful’s own compassionate responses and directly engage them in an empathetic identification with Christ’s sufferings. Such representations of Christ’s Passion colonized the early modern imagination through vivid, sensational, and highly emotive pictures, sculptures, and dramas that we have come to associate with late medieval and Renaissance art. There, an essentially cosmic, theological drama is given a human expression to elicit the faithful’s heightened, empathetic response to God’s incarnation and crucifixion (Belting 1981, 1994)Through a method that is philological, interpretative, historical and argumentative, this research proposes that it is early modern representations and enactments of Christ’s Passion that bring into being the “melodramatic imagination,” which Peter Brooks (1976) identified with the emergence of the modern self in the secular world of the late-18thcentury. We propose that following this medieval transformation in representation and experience, a complex history of melodramatic representation leads up to the modern period, where sacred idioms and secular themes are densely entwined and codified into what is recognized as modern melodrama. Dramatizing the secular martyrdom of ordinary humans caught in the forces of social injustice, modern melodrama thus emerges out of the very themes and history of Christian ethics, framed within an evolving secular dramaturgy.This research contributes to re-thinking the relationship between religion and secular modernity in the West, of great significance in the present historical moment (Asad 1993, 2003; Taylor 2007). Scholars of modern melodrama tend to explicate modern dramaturgy in the context of secular political struggles; for art historians, melodrama does not exist as a genre to be explained; and historians often give scant attention to affective history. By developing a history of the rhetorical and emotional impact of art, regardless of its medium, this research contributes to reorienting the study of the arts away from formal and local disciplinary concerns; demonstrates the centrality of affect to historical understanding; traces the history of melodrama as an aesthetic idiom that articulates a Christian ethics in secular form; and thereby transforms our understanding of the modern genre and the form of subjectivity it articulates.