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July 19, 2007
Samuel Beckett on Jesus and Laughter
by Faithful Progressive
Faith and Theology c/o connexions
Did Jesus laugh? The fictitious dispute in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose “is more than fiction. It reflects a line of tradition which really existed, from John Chrysostom through Augustine to Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugo of St Victor, of the Christian denunciation of laughter” (Karl-Josef Kuschel). Nor is such a “theology of tears” limited to the world-denying, death-obsessed zeitgeist of the Middle Ages. John Wesley once disciplined a preacher on the charges (in ascending order?) of heresy, adultery – and the man’s proneness to “break a jest, and laugh at it heartily.” Here, from Beckett’s Molloy, Moran debates the issue with Father Ambrose, who sides with Eco’s Jorge (a Dominican – who is blind):
“What a joy it is to laugh, from time to time, he said. Is it not? I said. It is peculiar to man, he said. So I have noticed, I said. A brief silence ensued. […] Animals never laugh, he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said. What? he said. It takes us to find that funny, I said loudly. He mused. Christ never laughed either, he said, so far as we know. He looked at me. Can you wonder? I said.”
You laughed, right? Christ, I reckon, would have cracked up too! Did he not have a Beckett-like sense of the absurd (gnats and camels, logs and splinters), the ironic (calling Simon a Πετρος, telling fishermen where to fish), and even the coarse (suggesting that one go starkers in court [Matthew 5:40], insinuating that the Pharisees are full of crap [Mark 7:15]). And is anyone going to tell me that a man who likes to party, with a reputation to go with it, doesn’t like a laugh? So with many a Renaissance Humanist, Eco’s William of Baskerville (a Franciscan, one of God’s “merry men” – who can see because he wears spectacles) was surely right: of course Jesus laughed!
Posted by Faithful Progressive at July 19, 2007 03:36 PM
