Finite Filial Bodies: Pentheus, Christ and a Parent’s Rage

Abstract

<p>In Greek tragedy, any hopeful configuration of the child as a vessel of futurity is repeatedly undermined. Projected upon the child’s finite body are all the uncertainties which haunt temporal beings faced with the limitation of the spheres of reason, order and justice. In Euripides’ Bacchae, the youth Pentheus is murdered at the hands of his mother in thrall to Dionysus. In the twelfth-century Christus Patiens ‘Suffering Christ’, a cento mostly patched together from quotations from Euripides, Christ is crucified in a manner which echoes Bacchae in theme and subject matter: persecution of a god, the death of a king, maternal lament. This paper explores the ways in which the language of ritual sacrifice is used to describe the death of a child. It reads tragedy through a theological lens to show how in Christus Patiens, Pentheus and Dionysus are mapped onto Christ, testing the limits of Christian drama. It suggests that the reception of Greek tragedy in early modern drama has important ramifications both in its crafting a new and different world-view, one which pitches the vindictive pagan destroyer Dionysus against the merciful redeemer Jesus Christ, and for the troubling reminder of pagan sacred experience incorporated in its vision.<br></p>