Christian drama vs Greek drama

I would wish to argue that Murder in the Cathedral is powerful as a drama, certainly, at that immediate and surface level of the audience’s first encounter with it; but that this unusual and striking power is dependent on the Christian component of the play in a way in which the Greek tragedy is not in the same way dependent upon its religious world-view. (Or, it could be that the Greek experience of living in a world governed by a hidden fortuna is very similar to living in the contemporary secular world. The feeling of having to manage luck, as we have seen in our discussion of Nussbaum’s reading of Greek tragedy, is only to near to the post-Christian person. )

This is because the Christian gospel is itself of the form of a dramatic action. Christianity is not at all disconnected from the action of the play, inhabiting only the fringes of the script in abstruse religious forms; rather it everywhere and necessarily gives its actual form to the action of the play. The death of Thomas is so obviously and so insistently an imitation of the death of Christ; the form of the action of the play resembles in outline the temptation, passion and death of Jesus, without which it cannot bear its full meaning.

We could go further in taking up Emrys Jones’s point about the historical aspect of the play: the connection with historical events through imaginative and symbolic reconstruction is quite distinctively a Christian development. Granted, Greek drama and literature on occasion took its subjects from history, or from pre-history: but it turned them into types and showed no real interest in the correspondence of the action to the action in history. In the Christian imagination, historical events are traceable in direct line back from the present: and though clearly ‘fictional’ elements are added to the reconstruction of the event in order to make the dramatisation appealing within the conventions of literary forms, we see reminders to the audience everywhere that there are real historical events to which the action is intended to correspond, and of which the audience is meant to have a vicarious experience. Could it ever be said of a Greek drama, as Jones says of Murder in the Cathedral, that it ‘takes its strength from its fidelity to history’? As we have seen, and as Eliot demonstrates in his play, a Christian view of the world rests on an understanding of providentia dei, not fortuna; and so history necessarily takes on a different significance as a meaningfully continuous series of events.