Jesus Christ, as an historical figure, was an anarchist, a revolutionary and God. Christians might contest the first two labels, but have denied the last at their peril. Historically, refusal to believe in Christ’s divinity amounted to heresy, even if the term "heretic" itself is now practically an historical artifact. As an anarchist, Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, preached his own selection of commandments and healed on the Sabbath, among other activities. As a revolutionary, he turned reality upside down by raising Lazarus from the dead, harrowing hell and preaching the Beatitudes. Such events were commonly dramatized in medieval Biblical Plays, with the possible exception of the Beatitudes. In fifteenth-century France at least, Jean Michel included even the latter in the second day of his Mystère de la Passion. French medieval theatre, however, is known to step out of the historical mode when the speech heading for Jesus Christ identifies Christ as Figura in the twelfth-century Jeu d’Adam, celebrated by Auerbach, or Anima Christi in the fifteenth-century Resurrection Play associated with Angers, where Christ’s soul is addressed as a lady: "Ma treschiere Dame et Maistresse" (l.2206 & l.3119). To my knowledge, the only text to consistently assign the speech heading Dieu/ Dieux to Jesus is the Mystère de la Passion Nostre Seigneur of Ms. 1311 in the Bibliothèque St. Geneviève.

My purpose here is to evaluate the application of a popular theatrical trend, seeking to rediscover Brecht in the post-modern world for quite valid reasons, to medieval theatre. Similarities between medieval theatre and Brechtian dramaturgy include the didactic function of both following the Horatian precept that drama, on the model of the epic, should simultaneously both teach and delight (ll.333-34; 343-44). Aristotle's Poetics was not translated into French until around 1536. For Brecht, whose dramatic tradition was already Aristotelian, the choice of an anti-Aristotelian dramaturgy is a deliberate strategy to reject "catharsis". His return to the Horatian principle of teaching and delighting consciously excludes from the stage the possibility of Einfühlung (empathy or sympathetic understanding). Brecht's purpose was to alienate the spectator from the stage, and the actor from him- or herself in a famous technique which he termed Verfremdungseffekt, popularly known as the "V-effect" (or "A-effect" for Alienation effect in English). Brecht develops his techniques in part from his observation of Chinese theatre. One technique which the actor may use to discourage the audience from identifying with him or her is "looking strangely at himself". The Chinese theatre also uses pantomime to this effect. Another technique is the mask, by which "classical and medieval theatre alienated its characters." The effect upon the audience is to distance them from the action so that they will see it through fresh eyes and re-evaluate it.

I attempted to grapple with some of the points of comparison stated above for the SITM conference three years ago in Denmark. This year, I want to focus upon another aspect. Besides being didactic, both the medieval and the Brechtian theatre have been described as "presentational" in opposition to the illusionistic theatre of the Victorian age. Just as the Brechtian actor self-consciously presents his or her character by calling attention to the artifice of the role, the medieval actor playing allegorical parts is assumed to have done the same. Finally, the prologues to the medieval plays which acknowledge the audience are said to contribute to this presentational aspect.

In order to test the notion that the medieval actors deliberately estranged themselves from their roles, I have selected four French Biblical Plays which flourished between 1450 and 1500 (before the Reformation): the Burgundian Passion de Semur, the Gréban-Michel family and the lesser-known one now associated with Angers whose author or fatiste, whoever he was, was neither a cleric, nor a theologian. The respective titles of the plays in the two principal families are Mystère de la Passion and Mystère de la Résurrection. This apex of the French medieval theatre coincides with the prominent use of the term mystère. According to research recently published by Graham Runnalls, the term was applied to playtexts between 1400 and 1560 when it signified the dramatization of a miraculous or mysterious event. The religious dimension of the word "mystery" remained part of its meaning, whose etymological origin can be traced back to the influence of the Greek mysterion, meaning "liturgical office", upon the related Latin term ministerium. The persistence of the religious sense of "mystery" is fortified by contemporary references to tableaux vivants as mystères up to ca. 1530. After this date, when the tableaux vivants assume allegorical and mythological subjects, they are no longer called mystères.

From another perspective, Alan Knight has distinguished the French mystères from moralités by emphasizing the figurative mode of interpretation of the former as distinct from the allegorical mode of the latter. If allegory intrudes at times into the mystère, it is tangential to the figurative mode (below the historical level) whose typology, hidden meanings (les sens cachés), biblical and liturgical resonances function in a manner more subtle than allegory. The religious mysteries with which these mystères are concerned are Jesus's incarnation, passion and resurrection, and his role in the Trinity: the same mysteries celebrated in the liturgy of the Catholic Church.

Consequently, playing God in the person of Christ is not necessarily to "present" the character in an allegorical mode defined (from a modern perspective) as a mode which presents "concrete illustrations of abstract arguments". To players of the Middle Ages, whether amateur or professional, God as an absolute being, creator and human saviour is unlikely to have been conceived as a mere abstraction. However, since the Medieval actor is equally unlikely to have left any record of his or her approach to a role, even if he or she was literate, and even if we could discover it, I have sought evidence in the only part of the plays which allows for any self-reflexivity: the prologue. Through close readings of the prologues and their theological sources, I am seeking a Medieval perspective on theatrical experience, as near to the actor's point of view as possible, before challenging modern misconceptions. In 1911, Georg Fuchs, for example, described the actor playing Christ in the Oberammergau Passion Play as a "non-actor... who does not represent but presents, in an impersonal way" by estranging himself from his role through his use of sacerdotal gestures.

All the prologues to these mystères deal, to some extent, with the theology upon which the plays are founded. Although Michel borrowed a great deal from Gréban, it should be noted that his one great "Prologue Capital" is entirely independent of Gréban's seven and reveals in itself a profound knowledge of theology including the hypostatic union, which he calls the union ypostatique (l.685) of the human and divine natures in the incarnate Christ. These prologues reiterate the topoi of earlier playtexts; they are concerned with crowd control and the presentation or recapitulation of the argument or plot, but that of Michel surpasses all others on the level of theological sophistication. Michel’s Prologue takes the form of a sermon upon the text from the Gospel of John, Verbum caro factum est (The Word was made flesh; John 1:14) with division and development of each word in the text. The Verbum is Jesus himself; the caro signifies his incarnation; factum refers to the deeds of Jesus which the play itself will develop; and finally est is the eternal essence of God, which being perfect in itself, "Puis voulut communiquer estre\ formant toutes les creatures" (846-47).

Unfortunately, these prologues tell us very little about the art of acting itself. The only two explicit concerns are limited to what is "said" and "done", as related to the two senses of sight and sound. The Angers prologue's concern with speaking and doing what is right: "Car nous n’entendons dire ou faire\ Riens qui soit a la foy contraire" (Servet, ed., 224-25) is echoed by Gréban when the prologue requests forgiveness "se rien avons dit ou escript\ ou mal fait ou mal ordonné, pour Dieu, qu'il nous soit pardonné!", and by Michel when he confesses that we "ne povons faire\ ne dire chose salutaire sans grace du ciel descendue"(13-15). Declamation and gesture are the two aspects of what I consider a rather two-dimensional dramaturgy, if I exclude the element of spectacle with which the stage directions are concerned. In all the Prologues, the first person plural pronoun nous expresses a responsibility shared by all the actors as well as the playwrights for speaking and acting correctly. "Correctly" or "healthily" (salutaire) means in accordance with the Scriptures and Catholic theology.

Most striking in all of the plays, if not in every prologue, is the regular call to prayer, much as we in Canada used to sing "God Save the Queen" before a play or film. The Angers Resurrection begins each of the three playing days with both the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. In Gréban's Passion, all the prologues to the four days of playing, with one exception, begin with an invitation to pray the rosary, Ave Maria. Michel’s Prologue, for its part, emphasizes humility to a similar end: "Humilïon donques nos cueurs" (350).

Gréban's prologue adds one further pre-requisite of "love", initially the "amoureuse silence" (5) requested from the audience in the first prologue. That the actors are inspired by the same devout love is made explicit at the opening of the second day: "Or vouldrons, par tres bonne amour,\ commancer nostre second jour" (9994-95), and in the "Prologue Final": "Et pour finir nostre mistere,\ joyeusement d’amour promus" (34425-26). Both actors and audience are therefore united in a devotional act of love which inspires both the presentation and reception of the play itself.

Illusion or delusion is never an issue. Image and similitude point to the higher mysteries. The Passion de Semur explicitly states that they are playing "par similitude" (167) which the audience will see "à l'aide de Dieu" (169). It also emphasizes the image which God placed in man "Lors forma homme a son ymaige" (128). The reference is to Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in his own image". Quoting an unspecified text by St. Augustine, the author exhorts the audience to approach the image of God in the incarnation of Jesus Christ

Ad ymaginem etc.

D'elle nous aprochons,

Courons a son ymaige (68-70).

This exhortation to approach the image of God must be taken figuratively, although the literal reference is to the image of Christ in the manger at the Nativity.

Like all the others involved in the production of the play, the actors must have understood their own role to visualize the action for the simple people:

Et mesmement point n'en saroient

Simples gens, s'ilz ne les voiënt,

Jamais concevoir në entendre

Les fins a quoy ce jeu veult tendre.

(Servet ed., 95-102)

Visual images help the simple people to conceive and comprehend (concevoir... entendre, 101) the ends or aim of the production. It is noteworthy that the use of the verb "concevoir" in this context supports the view of an Englishman in the seventeenth-century: that Medieval theatre sought to "conceive" the action rather than to "deceive" the audience.

To illustrate briefly the commemorative and salvific function of these plays, I quote both Gréban and Michel. For Gréban, memory of the passion serves to restore the sinner to moral rectitude in the temporal sphere, as stated in his third Prologue:

Qui bien l'escoute et bien l'entend,

a nul mal faire ne pretend... (19932-33)

Car, quant en memoire luy vient

la fortune qui luy survient,

acunement se desmodere, ... (19938-40)

For Michel, the redemptive merit of the commemoration is above all eternal:

ce que voulons rememorer

de la passion Jesus Crist,

affin d'en rapporter le fruit

tres utille et meritoire

lassus en eternelle gloire (110-14).

For both Gréban and Michel, the fruit of remembering the passion is conducive to an ethical life which leads to eternal glory. Ultimately, all the fatistes imply that the true merit of commemorating Christ's passion and resurrection lies in its instrumental effect upon their own, the actors' and the audience's personal salvation. The operative word in those quotations is nous (we), which implicates both actors and audience as intrinsically bound up in working out their own salvation.

Instead of using the word equivalent to "salvation", Michel’s Prologue describes the beatific state to which salvation leads by mixing the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius with that of St. Paul. Like the former, he ranks the Trinity above a hierarchy of angels who ravish those ranked below with intellectual love for God:

et, pres de la divine essence,

assistent les haulx seraphins

embrasés d’amour, clers et fins.

Et ont leur intellection

qu’ilz ayment Dieu si ardamment

qu’il n’est humain entendement

viateur qui le sceust comprendre.

Puis, se aux autres fault condescendre,

de la haulte divinité

et, selon sa capacité,

est remply de divine grace.

Such burning ecstasy, filled with divine grace, is also accessible to human beings at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder or chain, even if they cannot comprehend it:

et ceulx qui ont plus merité

dés leur creacion premiere

inspirent, embrasent et purgent.

The tripartite division of inspiring, burning and purging is an expression of the threefold path which a human contemplative would take towards mystical union with God. This is the ladder by which the audience may rise in contemplation to final union with God. It is notable that the process begins with inspiration and ends, as the following quotation reveals, with seeing God:

Et pouront en joye perempnele

remplis de lumiere et de grace...

car ceulx qui plus meriteront,

plus grande congnoisçance auront

et entendront Dieu plus a plain,

combien que chascun sera plein...

de l'amour de Dieu qu'i verra...

le Pere et Filz et Sainct Esprit.

Consequently, union with God is not only to see God, but is also a communion with love, the same love emphasized by Gréban. There are numerous other examples in Michel's Passion and the Angers Resurrection of the saved seeing God face to face which echo St. Paul’s words: "for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face" (1 Cor.13:12). For example, the playwright, on behalf of the community, prays that the "Verbe eternel" (the incarnate word) may grant them a vision of the object of their faith "Et que face a face voyons/ Ce que voyons en enigmate" (Michel, 351-55). God must remain an enigma until the full beatific vision is bestowed, only after death and judgement, yet the process towards salvation is promoted by seeing God face to face, however darkly, on the stage.

In summary, these prologues indicate that the actors came to their roles in an attitude of humility, devotion and love and that they shared this attitude with their audience. There is no suggestion anywhere of any barriers between audience and actor, or actor and his role. The purpose of the mystère is initially commemorative, but ultimately to promote universal salvation. From a low rung on the contemplative ladder to God, the performance of the play is at once a facilitator of contemplation and a preview of that beatific vision when the saved shall see the Creator face to face. It seems reasonable to conclude, then, that the actor made every possible effort to convert himself fully into his role through inspiration and a kind of Coleridgean "suspension of disbelief" in what Eugenio Barba describes as a "leap of energy".

The theological underpinnings to the Prologues lend further support to this view. In two prologues, only, the auctoritates behind the theology are mentioned: St. Augustine, cited vaguely in the prologue to the Passion de Semur, and St. Thomas Aquinas cited by Gréban with reference to his commentary on the Third Book of the Sentences of Peter Lombard (d.1160), the most widely commented text in the High Middle Ages. Aquinas' early commentary, written in 1254-56 during his first stay in Paris, emphasizes two critical concepts concerning the relationship between God and humankind: the mystical body and that of human participation in the divinity through conformity and imitation. Christ is the head and Christians are the limbs of the mystical body. Because of the hypostatic union and the creation of humankind (Adam and Eve) in the image of God, the human response to grace is to seek again that divine image which resides within us.

Aquinas further develops the consequences of the incarnation in his more philosophical Summa Contra Gentiles. Particularly relevant are the prevailing notions of image and imitation. In the first book, he considers the question of mankind's likeness to God (De similitudine creaturarum ad Deum, cap.XXIX). Referring to the Genesis account of God's wish to make man in his own image, he admits a certain likeness between God and man, but agrees with Pseudo-Dionysius that they are at once both alike and unlike (sic et non): "They are like according as they imitate as much as they can Him Who is not perfectly imitable; they are unlike as effects are lesser than their causes." Consequently, conformity to the image of God requires imitation, however imperfect, and acting as a mimetic activity is a form of imitation.

In the same chapter, Aquinas also considers and dismisses the possibility of man creating God in his own image:

Another related Thomist idea is defined in Aquinas' 19^th chapter of the third book of this Summa: Quod omnia intendunt assimilari Deo (That all things tend to become like God). Citing Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione (I, 7 324a 1) that the agent makes a product after its own likeness, Aquinas reiterates a favourite theme.

The response on the part of the created being is to seek again that to which it was originally like. And this motion aims both at the primary cause and ultimate aim of its existence, the first agent, God. This intimate relationship between God and mankind, therefore, justifies the actor’s imitation of the divine prototype as another means of attaining to "the divine likeness".

The theology of St. Augustine complements that of Aquinas, but places more emphasis upon love. In chapter 14 of his De Trinitate, Augustine defines the real image of God in the human being not as outward appearance, but as inward soul. This image cannot be eradicated, but it can be tarnished by sin. It is re-activated by the mind (mens) turning to God in contemplation and love, and forms a human trinity in its action of remembering, knowing and loving God. Because the mystères commemorate the passion and resurrection of Christ, they too inspire the knowledge and love of God which re-activates the divine image in both the actors and their audience. In this light, the image which the actor was seeking was not so much one of outward verisimilitude as something interior. He sought to "conceive" it within himself.

From here, the great leap forward to the nineteenth-century German school from which Brecht emerged is no Kierkegardian "leap of faith". The subtle shift from a theocentric to an anthropocentric universe in the Renaissance, which I could also argue, was nothing to the radical inversion of medieval theology which Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) initiated in his Essence of Christianity of 1841, in which he promoted the "first comprehensive projection theory of religion". Karl Barth calls Feuerbach an "anti-theologian" in reaction as much to Hegel as to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. From Hegel's basic proposition of an Absolute Idea in place of God, Feuerbach concluded that, in reality, "Being determines Consciousness". In fact, "Not God had created man, but rather man created God, in his own image." Feuerbach is not actually making a direct attack on Christianity, but its Judaic roots, when he makes this point in his eleventh chapter on "The Significance of the Creation in Judaism":

The reference is to the same passage in Genesis (1:26-27) whose consequences are reiterated throughout the work of Aquinas, and reflected in the Passion de Semur. Here, however, Feuerbach’s ironic inversion aiming at what he considers the "supernaturalistic egotism" of the Jewish race is tainted enough in itself to undermine his credibility. But the notion of creatures creating their own creator has ramifications which go far beyond the Judæo-Christian tradition. Feuerbach’s premise that mankind has projected its own image of God into human consciousness renders God an empty prototype, an airy abstraction, a non-entity. God does not exist for anyone and never did. In the year of Feuerbach’s death, 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy.

Nietsche's contribution to the "hermeneutics of suspicion" is less relevant at this point than his influence upon another oft-quoted German scholar of so-called medieval theatre, Georg Fuchs. Writing in 1911, Fuchs cites Nietzsche in his Sezession in der dramatischen Kunst as the one to identify the function of theatre as realizing the fundamental knowledge of the unity of all existence. This is "the mystery doctrine of tragedy" discussed in the Birth of Tragedy whose origin, Nietzsche concurs, lies in the Greek satyr chorus. From his own Nietzschean perspective, Fuchs procedes to analyse the Oberammergau Passion Play in Aristotelian terms. He describes the Last Supper as the peripeteia (or reversal of the action) and the Crucifixion as the catastrophe, emphasizing again the fundamental principle of what he terms "folk art": the chorus. He likens the chorus at the Entry into Jerusalem and at the Trial to that of classical drama, primitive cults and Medieval German mystery plays. The original choric style grows out of the pious yearning of a community to experience the expiating events of the holy sacrifice of atonement as directly as possible. The resultant catharsis is deeply religious and mystical, springing from the pre-Christian need for blood sacrifice. The medieval biblical plays do not entail a chorus, not even in the German tradition, but at least beneath the syncretism, there is still hope for some human empathy.

Furthermore, the Oberammergau Passion Play is hardly representative of the Middle Ages. It originated in response to a plague in 1633, when the Village Council and Jesuits co-operated to produce the play, much like other communal acts of atonement after some such disaster in the Middle Ages. Until the script was revised to avoid "any aggression toward Jews", under the direction of the co-director Otto Huber for the recent production of 2000, the previous script had been in use since 1859. Fuchs presumably saw the performance in 1910, in which the actor playing Christ, Anton Lang, impressed him considerably.

It is his description of Lang which is so often quoted, since as Eugenio Barba puts it, Fuchs considered Lang a "non-actor" who presents rather than represents a role. Fuchs goes on to say that Lang's interpretation is "much more like that of a priest than an actor, as it should be." The vocabulary which Fuchs uses is as slippery as his interpretation. The actual German text uses the words "den er vorstellt - nicht darstellt" to mean a role (Christ) which the actor places before the audience without attempting to become (as actors usually do). But even the German terms are problematic; for example, the dramatized episode on the "Presentation of Christ at the Templë" is "Christi Darstellung im Templum" in German. Here, darstellen could not possibly mean represent. Both of the German verbs have wider semantic ranges than the common translation of Fuchs would allow. Clearly, the distinction between presenting and representing is not only problematic in itself, but also less faithful to mediaeval religious theatre than the distinction between conceiving rather than deceiving.

Fuchs clearly says that the actor playing Christ is not acting, but what he is doing is less clear. Whatever a priest does, Anton Lang was doing it! The question remains: does the Catholic priest consciously estrange himself from his representation of Christ in the Mass through ceremonious gesture and impersonal speech? His gesture is ritualized, but it is not necessarily self-conscious. Nor is it achieved by "looking strangely at himself" as in the A-effect. Furthermore, as O. B. Hardison demonstrated sometime ago, the Liber officialis of Amalarius of Metz (d. c.850) provides one early witness to a conscious interpretation of the Mass as drama. This aspect of Fuchs's interpretation, being the most slippery, is beyond the scope of this paper.

The influence of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity upon Karl Marx is an equally significant factor for theatre history because of Marx's emphasis upon "alienation" which, in turn, influenced Brecht. Both Marx and Engels accept the fundamental inversion of the Judæo-Christian notion of creation when they state "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" in The German Ideology. They both deny that the kingdom or "'realm of God' had ever existed anywhere save in the imagination". Three years after Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity appeared, Marx published his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, of which the key concept is alienation (Entfremdung, Entäusserung or Veräusserung) under the direct influence of Feuerbach as well as Hegel. For Marx, alienation originated with the Medieval notion of transferring property to another. As a result of the industrial revolution, labour itself became alienating because the work no longer offered satisfaction to the worker in the mere performance of it. The only satisfaction to be gleaned from production lay in the act of selling the product. In the process, people who entered into contracts became mere pieces of property, alienated from themselves, from their species, from nature, and from each other as individuals. Within this philosophical orientation (or Weltanschauung), German theatre was already experimenting with A-effects before Brecht inherited the tradition.

Brecht, like Fuchs, has also been accused of syncretism for adopting Chinese technique into German theatre without a proper appreciation of the "vision of the craft which brings [the Chinese theatre] alive". Within this Marxist orientation, Brecht coined the term Verfremdung from two Russian words meaning "device for making strange" after attending a Chinese production in Moscow in 1935. Consequently, the historical context from which Brecht emerged was the antithesis of the Judæo-Christian tradition which spawned the mystère. Even the act of creation has been reversed into a purely human function. The inspiration of which the fatistes speak can hardly exist where love, empathy and emotion are actively discouraged. In short, the rushing in of "alienation" to fill the void left by a vacant God, imagined by the intellectual descendants of Hegel, cannot be projected onto the medieval stage.

A better analogy for understanding the Medieval approach to such a role would be the artist’s approach to the icon of the Greek Eastern Church at its height in twelfth-century Byzantium. Then too the artists approached their work in an attitude of humility before the great feat of painting the presence of God into an icon. Before even beginning to paint, the iconographer fasted and studied theology. Although the theology of human likeness to the image of God has been part of Christian theology throughout the centuries", as articulated in the works of all the Fathers to greater and lesser degrees, the concept has been more fully developed by the Greek Eastern Church which terms it theosis (deification). This process which involves a double movement from God to human form and the human one back to God is the fulfillment of Genesis 1:26: "And God said, 'Let us make man in our image'". Western theologians are now discovering similar concepts veiled in Latin vocabulary in the works of St. Augustine, among others. By renewing ties with Greek Orthodoxy, which began by offering Western theatre the original meaning of mysterion, we might come closer to a true understanding of the Medieval actor’s representation of the "mysteries" than we will by studying the German context of Georg Fuchs and Bertolt Brecht.

A French philosopher of the icon has recently observed that the image and the icon are at the heart of every meditation upon the symbol and the sign, as well as the whole problem of being and appearing (p.12). For the Orthodox believer, the icon is not an historical artifact, but is intimately bound up with a spiritual path (p.95). The image is invisible, whereas the icon is its visual manifestation. The image is eternal similitude, the icon is temporal resemblance. The image is mystery, the icon is enigma (p.15). These terms reiterate those found in the prologues.

Finally, although Byzantine icon painters of the more unified style which emerged from the iconoclastic controversy (726-843 A.D.) knew enough about perspective to be able to apply it to their paintings when appropriate, icons of Christ, as of the other saints, were deliberately two-dimensional. Perspective, in fact, was considered an unnecessary distraction. Realism, for them, did not involve illusion, but the indwelling image of the divine to which both the artist and viewer aspired. Likewise in the West, God is the third dimension which infuses the binary aspect of French medieval dramaturgy, as articulated in the prologues (declamation and gesture), with spiritual depth.

In conclusion, the radical inversion of the creature’s relationship to the Creator and the consequent alienation which we have inherited separates us from the Middle Ages by a great gulf. Whether we accept it or not, the prevailing belief of our age treats God as a mere abstraction or hypothetical truth at best. Nevertheless, our failure to perceive the depth which underlies medieval theatre is a blindness beguiled by our demand for outward verisimilitude in the superficial world of appearance. We have learned to replace the painting with the photograph, the theatre with the film and direct experience with virtual reality. The greater our skill in perfecting the outward image, the greater our distance from that mysterious essence which transcends the senses of sight and sound. Because Verbum caro factum est, God was in that "amoureuse silence" which Gréban requested from his audience. If Jesus Christ could be seen for what he truly was, anarchist, revolutionary and God, rather than the two-dimensional facade to which we have reduced him, it might point us back ad imaginem dei. In any case, the increasingly impersonal globe would benefit far more from a revival of the "vision" behind medieval religious theatre rather than by the further propagation of alienation and suspicion à la Brecht.