Doubtful Embodiment

The character of Christianity’s de facto heel, Satan, is ever-shifting, culturally reactionary, and exceedingly difficult to elucidate given the multitude of varied interpretations pervading hermeneutic discourse for centuries.

In the medieval York Corpus Christi cycle play The Harrowing of Hell, Satan is portrayed as more than just an evil trickster as he attempts to thwart the newly-deceased Jesus’s efforts to bring various biblical prophets to salvation from Hell. Through this intersemiotic translation of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus to live theatre,* the character of Satan takes on numerous extra profound interpretations that directly relate to the audience viewing. In this essay I will explore this interpretation of the role of Satan in the 14th-16th century religious zeitgeist while applying different religious theories in order to show that the confluence of these ideas has implications for the medieval audience far beyond the individual theories themselves.

* Orthography in Canadian English throughout.

Henry Ansgar Kelly opens his 2006 book Satan: A Biography with two quotations…

… that Kelly believes to be important in showing Satan’s different roles, both from the book of Revelations. “The first (Revelations 12:10) shows that Satan has the function of Celestial Prosecutor against humanity, a position from which he is to be ousted some time in the future, according to this visionary prophecy. The second (Revelations 22:16) has Jesus calling himself the Bright Morning Star, or, in Latin, Lucifer.” Kelly continues to clarify that “it was not until post-biblical times that [the name] Lucifer was associated with Satan” (Kelly, 1). These ideas of Satan’s character seem to have been altered by the addition of the New Testament, and thus Christianity, to religious study.

“The most significant retro-fitting that has occured in the history of Satan,” says Kelly, “is the thoroughgoing re-interpretation of the Satan in the New Testament [...] as a rebel against God. More than any other, this interpretation has bedeviled the history of Satan, transforming him from a merely obnoxious functionary of the Divine Government into a personification of Evil, a personification that really exists as a person” (Kelly, 2). In the study of Satan’s character during the medieval time of the Corpus Christi cycle plays, any interpretation of Satan as “celestial prosecutor” cannot be applied to this semiotic study as the redefinition of Satan’s assumed role in Christianity had already happened centuries before. This shift positing Satan as God’s inferior foil can be seen throughout The Harrowing of Hell, as Satan is shown to be on equal footing with Jesus through the very definition of their verbal battle, a topic that will be elaborated on later. In short: the cultural shift of Satan from annoying legislator to evil presence had already taken place by the time this cycle play was penned, and thus many different societal readings can be interpreted in lieu of the disregarded “original” concepts of Satan that Kelly posits through his study. 

To medieval Christians in the 14th-16th centuries, the Corpus Christi cycles ratified a number of prevailing religious ideas.

One of these general ideas is directly related to the presented form of the cycles themselves: all the individual plays are part of a specific whole. Hardin Craig, in his 1914 essay “The Corpus Christi Procession and the Corpus Christi Play” draws attention to this fact, saying “Corpus Christi plays were characterized [...] by completeness of cyclical content. They extended from the Creation to Doomsday, and they included plays of the Nativity, as well as of the Passion and Resurrection” (Craig, 594). Presenting the individual plays in this manner shows a direct effort to draw a timeline of Christianity, from the beginning to the end, that is temporally salient to the religious audience viewing. This concept reflects the divine reality these medieval civilians lived in: humans cannot possibly know God’s intentions as the divine timeline exists outside of human agency. Important here is the human conceptualization of God’s time. “The underlying assumption would seem to be that since the present determines the future, the future can be said to be already present, and that—more significantly—in God there is no distinction of time,” writes V.A. Kolve in the seminal work The Play Called Corpus Christi. “Augustine discussed this very fact,” he continues: “‘But what is future to God who transcends all time? If God’s knowledge contains these things, they are not future to Him but present; therefore it can be termed not fore-knowledge, but simply knowledge” (Kolve, 116-117). This idea, prominently held in medieval religious consideration, is nothing that hasn’t already been expounded upon by numerous scholars. However, this supported theory offers nuanced insight into the character of Satan, as the consistency of a universal timeline set into motion by a higher power implies the existence of unwavering character motivations to support the consistency, and by extension the veracity, of this timeline.

As emphasized earlier, while Kelly’s interpretation of the entire strata of Satan-focused theological study goes beyond simply the “tempter and trixter” New Testament cultural reconceptualization of the devil, these two traits were undoubtedly attributed to Satan in medieval interpretations. In fact, these interpretations of Satan viewed him as doubtful that Jesus was actually the Son of God. David Wee, in his essay “The Temptation of Christ and the Motif of Divine Duplicity in the Corpus Christi Cycle Drama,” says “medieval theory [...] assumes that the devil tempted Christ primarily in order to discover whether Christ was the Son of God, a possibility that he suspected but of which he had great doubt” (Wee, 1).

While Wee goes on to explain the multitude of reasons contemporary hermeneutic scholars disregard this theory as having no grounds in scripture, it was still the prevailing theory of the time that—during the Temptation of Christ—Satan was simply trying to ascertain whether or not Jesus truly was the Son of God. This applies doubt to Satan’s character, a profound and then-heretical concept that was not brought into any sort of prominence until after the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century when Luther and other theologians placed emphasis on the scripture of the disciple Thomas’s doubt of Jesus' Resurrection. This reframing of doubt in various sects can be attributed to the more separated religious and social life of the 16th century compared to medieval Christianity. In C. John Sommerville’s 1990 essay “Religious Faith, Doubt, and Atheism,” he makes the point that “it is perhaps a misnomer to speak of religion as a ‘faith’ in such an early period if one assumes a modern understanding of faith as a conscious act, a ‘leap’ beyond doubt. In a time when virtually every aspect of life was related to religion it is more useful to speak of religious culture than religious faith” (Sommerville, 154). Every part of Christian medieval society, from the top to the bottom, was borne out of religious principle or undertone. To doubt faith or even specific aspects of faith was to doubt the culture that a person was raised in, thus leading the doubt of religion to be interpreted as a doubt of family, culture, and society. It is no wonder that people portrayed as doubtful in this society were shunned by their colleagues and cast out or begged to return to the proverbial light. Satan’s character in The Harrowing of Hell responds to these cultural anxieties by embodying them through his contrarian attitude toward Jesus, a paragon of the divine.

In the study of creative writing for entertainment, many educators drive home the point that while actions show an audience what characters will do, the way the character is presented to the story world is through their interactions with other characters: their dialogue. The York play of The Harrowing of Hell characterizes Satan through the lens of flyting: traditional 15th and 16th century poetic battles in and around Scotland. Flyting was a poetic competition between skilled wordsmiths, the closest existing modern cognate being alternating verse rap battles. These competitions were not open-ended tirades but closely contained packets of words tied to specific phonological and metering systems meant to discredit and make a rhetorical laughingstock of their opponent. While insults and vitriol made up a large percentage of these verbal bouts, Encyclopedia Britannica points out that “although contestants attacked each other spiritedly, they actually had a professional respect for their rival’s vocabulary of invective” (Britannica). Many of these flags exist in Jesus and Satan’s theological battle, specifically their stanza structure being strictly ABABABABCDCD throughout, as well as their trading of insults once Satan drops his faux-friendly demeanor. This shows that even though Jesus is inherently dismissive of Satan’s proclaimed power and attitude, Jesus and Satan are both rising to each other’s verbal challenges with ease, showing that neither of them are arrogant or boastful of their abilities in this specific verbal venue.

Since dialogue is instrumental in connecting an audience with a character…

… this specific instance of Jesus and Satan flyting over the souls of many prominent biblical figures is incredibly important for the York cycle and cycle plays in general as it gives the audience a candid look into the inner workings of their 14th-16th century cultural Satan. This is revealed through the varied arguments and appeals Jesus and Satan construct. While Jesus routinely stays focused on the core of their debate, that he has the heavenly ordained right to come to Hell and release these souls that Satan should have no power over, Satan continues to reframe the debate in an attempt to trick Jesus with rhetorical fallacies as well as insulting members of his family including Mary. Jesus is shown to routinely focus on the scriptures—the evidence—that are being fulfilled through his actions in Hell, delivering many stanzas to this point:

JESUS: They said that I should be in obit,
To Hell that I should enter in,
And save my servants from that pit
Where damned souls shall sit for sin.
And ilka true prophet’s tale
Must be fulfilled in me:
I have bought them with bale,
And in bliss shall they be.
(Broadview, 116, L269–276)

This focus on prophetic scripture shows the audience what “true” Christianity looked like in medieval life, fully giving the self to the scripture and, by extension, God. Jesus never attacks Satan with anything other than the texts themselves and simple references to Satan’s character (such as “thou wicked fiend, let be thy din”) (Broadview, 116, L234). This is important due to the fact that quoting scripture is perceived as a legitimate argument in its own right due to cultural norms and the aforementioned calcified timeline of creation, but Satan’s consequent attempt at religious interpretation is viewed as heretical and an abuse of pride. While Satan routinely drags in prominent biblical characters such as Solomon and Job to attempt to discredit Jesus’s points, he directly accuses Jesus of picking and choosing which of God’s laws he wants to follow, saying:

SATAN: Now since thee list allege the laws,
Thou shall be attainted ere we twin.
(Broadview, 116, L277–278)

To stand before one of the most holy of holy beings, one part of the divine trinity, and tell them that they have incorrectly interpreted their Father’s scripture is a blatant reference to heretical movements finding fault with the teachings of religious leaders, a crime punishable by death or excommunication. Through changing the focus of Jesus’s arguments, Satan is showing his traditional role as Christ’s antithesis while playing out representations of widespread theological and sociopolitical “temptations” of the day. Satan’s role is even spelled out directly as one of his final lines in the play:

SATAN: Now here my hand, I hold me paid,
This point is plainly for our prow.
If this be sooth that thou hast said
We shall have mo than we have now.
This law that thou now late has laid
I shall lere men not to allow;
If they it take, they be betrayed,
For I shall turn them tite, I trow.
I shall walk east and west,
And gar them work well war.
(Broadview, 117, L325–334)

Even though Jesus shrugs off these comments and binds Satan to the depths of Hell, these words cannot be discounted for their effect on the audience. For a layperson watching this characterization of Satan play out before them as part of the Corpus Christi cycle and applying the prominent societal conceptions of the past, present, and future being part of a consistent and ratified divine timeline, Satan embodying the very things this religious-centric society thought of as heretical and anti-communal would be a horrifying thing to contend with. This characterization serves to catalyze specific connections in the minds of the audience: that the power of Satan is alive and well in their current position along this religious timeline, and that Satan is something that is always focused on tempting the audience and tricking them away from their path to salvation.

This is an incredibly important point in relation to the audience due to the fact that Satan calls out specifically for Mohammed to save him from being chained to the depths of Hell:

SATAN: Out! Ay harrow! Help, Mahound!
(Broadview, 117, L343)

Remembering how intrinsically faith and social life were tied in medieval Christianity, the worst possible humans to these Christians were the ones that worshipped a different God than their true God and exalted some ostensibly heretical deity (Mohammed) above Jesus. Satan calling out to Mohammed for assistance against Jesus shows that Satan is a follower of Islam but not Christianity, but more importantly shows how the characters of Mohammed and Jesus and what they represent to their respective religions were conflated for dogmatic purposes. Projecting this idea beyond Islamic and Christian Othering, a theological battle between two prominent forces in a religious world can be reframed around any religious debate, another reminder to the audience that Satan’s interpretation of religious scripture could relate to new and subversive theological ideas in their own sects and to be wary of the ways and means behind changes in belief. These salient realizations force the audience to contend with existential ideas and be mindful of the ways they parse new theories and information, especially considering the intensely theocratic nature of medieval Christian society.

While hermeneutic interpretation varies wildly from century to century and sect to sect…

… the religious realities in 14th-16th century medieval Christianity are clear and straightforward in their characterization of Satan but complicated through the confluence of other prevailing ideas colouring Satan. The audience’s profound rationalizations around Satan and the nature of good versus evil in their world take centre stage in The Harrowing of Hell, viewing Satan through the lens of religious counterforces in the life of the audience. Because of the audience’s view of culture and society being so inextricably tied to religious devotion, Satan becomes something more than a symbol of Jesus’s temptation and the antithesis of God’s love: a living, breathing manifestation of anything the audience perceives as Other to them that will stop at nothing to sway them from their steady faith in Jesus Christ and their belief that he was and is the Son of God.

— Gabriel Stenson Pehrson, 2019

Works Cited*

Craig, Hardin. “The Corpus Christi Procession and the Corpus Christi Play.” Vol. 13, no. 4, 1914, pp. 589–602., www.jstor.org/stable/27700625. Accessed 2 Dec. 2019.

Kolve, Verdel A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford Univ. Press, 1980.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Flyting.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 12 Dec. 2014, www.britannica.com/art/flyting. Accessed 29 Nov. 2019.

“The Harrowing of Hell.” The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama, by Christina Maria Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian, Broadview Press, 2013, pp. 111–118.

Sommerville, C. John. “Religious Faith, Doubt and Atheism.” no. 128, 1990, pp. 152–155. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/651012. Accessed 2 Dec. 2019.

Wee, David L. “The Temptation of Christ and the Motif of Divine Duplicity in the Corpus Christi Cycle Drama.” Vol. 72, no. 1, 1974, pp. 1–16., www.jstor.org/stable/436146. Accessed 3 Dec. 2019. 

* Trust me—I can do hanging indents, but SquareSpace gets angry when I try.