Culture Abhors a Vacuum

And how the Body of Christ made way for Shakespeare

Ring out the bells for Corpus Christi!

This is what they did in my hometown of Yeovil back in 1457. The records show a payment of a penny “To the ringers for ringing on the feast of Corpus Christi while the procession went around town…”¹

Alright, then. YOU try and find an eye-catching picture to go with his article.

What is Corpus Christi?

‘Corpus Christi’ means ‘the body of Christ’. On the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, the main event is carrying around the consecrated bread – the body of Christ – under a canopy. After all, we can’t have the elements exposed to the, er, elements.

The bread or ‘host’ is kept in a ‘pyx’. That’s the name for the special ornate box for the transportation of the consecrated bread if someone were sick and unable to come to church. Priests often took precautions to stop the punters getting their hands on the consecrated bread. If you believe the bread really becomes the body of Christ, as they did in 1457, that makes sense. This doctrine is called transubstantiation and it had gathered steam during the Medieval period.

There many precautions taken by priests to stop the superstitious use of the consecrated bread. Any farmer in an agrarian society was only one bad harvest away from starvation. They could be forgiven for looking for a way to ensure God’s blessing on their crops. What better way than scattering fragments of the host over the fields? Okay, I can think of one better way, like praying “Give us this day our daily bread” as Christ taught us. But if you see consecrated bread, you might well be tempted to give it a try.

If the bread is literally the body of Christ, then why shouldn’t touching it impart blessing? Look at the woman in the gospels who suffered internal bleeding. She was healed merely by touching the cloak of Christ. There is, at least, a logic there.

The irony is that keeping the host locked up in a pyx and parading it around the town only amplifies the impression that the holy host is potent, miraculous and out of reach.

The Origin Story

The Feast of Corpus Christi was not an ancient festival. Visions from Saint Juliana of Liège in the early 13^thcentury become a local feast in the Low Countries by order of the local Bishop. Jacques Pantaléon, who had been involved in the initial establishment of the feast in Liège, became Pope Urban IV and in 1264 issued the papal bull Transiturus de hoc mundo establishing Corpus Christi as a feast for the whole church. In England, the festival was supercharged by Thomas Aquinas and relaunched by Pope John XXII.

There are other feasts days that were instituted even later than this, like the Feast of the Transfiguration. But it is safe to say there was a ‘last in, first out’ policy when it came to reforming Church of England. Corpus Christi celebrations were a prime target for those looking to extinguish belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation.

However, I think they threw out the baby with the baptismal water. We lost something special that went along with processions: the mystery plays and the pageants which retold the Christian story. This was a common practice in towns and cities across England, most notably York, Wakefield, Chester and Coventry.

This was not unlike our practice of acting out the nativity story, but this was on a much grander scale with multiple stages and platforms across the town. In York, in 1415, 54 stages were erected across the town on which different stories were acted out, from Cain and Abel to the Slaughter of the Innocents.

Wakefield’s plays are perhaps the best-known, or at least most remembered. There was a cycle of 32 plays in all, starting with creation and ending with the Last Judgment. Different trades and guilds tended to act out the same story every year. There was often a separate Corpus Christi guild that put on these productions.

A Mixed Blessing?

It is easy to forget these annual plays were a rare experience for the people of England. They were hearing the stories of the Bible presented in a comprehensible, visual way in their own language. Scripture was not being intoned in Latin chants, or interpreted by priests, some of whom were ignorant of many of the stories themselves.

In the days before printing, there simply was no access to the pages of scripture. Handwritten Bibles were wildly expensive, written in Latin and locked away in monasteries. Moreover, English translations of the Bible were forbidden, with the exception of some tracts containing the Lord’s Prayer in English.

Even the introduction of a chained Bible in every parish church in 1535 did not shift the needle on Biblical familiarity. Most people could not read – just as today most people can’t code. There are people to do that for you.

Could a Biblically illiterate people stage plays that were faithful to the stories themselves? Good point. There was undoubtedly liberty and licence with the text. Some of the Wakefield mystery plays were, I am told, literary masterpieces. Others were bawdy and irreverent. But it is preferable the stories were performed and imagined, rather than remaining untold and locked away in Latin.

What Happened Next

Some plays survived the Reformation, but not for long. Corpus Christi plays ran until 1584 in York. One can’t help but notice that the stages left bare by the abolition of mystery plays were soon reoccupied. Culture abhors a vacuum. Ten years later, or thereabouts, Two Gentlemen of Verona was performed for the first time. A golden age of theatre had begun. Congregations went to watch. And so began the secularisation of the culture.

The Church had no answer, and had no intention of answering. That was until 1642, when a Puritan parliament shut the theatres. They remained closed for another 18 years. But the tradition of Christian theatre had gone the way of Corpus Christi: it was a faint memory.

We now take English Bibles for granted. You could celebrate Corpus Christi by remembering the tradition of mystery plays and acting out some of your favourite Bible stories. Just breaking it into parts and reading the text out loud brings it to life. Far be it from me to encourage you to do it in the street, but maybe…

(Now at least does the picture at the top make sense?)

---

Here’s something else you could do for Corpus Christi: listen to Bible stories re-imagined on The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer podcast. You’ll need to do that very soon because it is about to disappear owing to an overwhelming lack of interest. It’s all there for now, for free, including how to get hold of the last half hour, also for free. But now’s the time to listen:

1. p264, Old Parish Life