God at Play - The Divine Trickster

It is pleasure to announce the publication of 'God at Play' edited by my esteemed colleague, Dr Daniel Soars, Head of Divinity at Eton College. As part of the fiesta I have contributed a chapter on the 'Divine Trickster' part of which I include below... Serio Ludere!

Peter

One of the primary inspirations for this chapter was to ensure that this volume contained a psycho-spiritual account of the importance of play and laughter within the activity of the Deus Ludens. This is amply provided for by the accounts of the tricksters and their Christian cousins, the holy fools, to whom we shall turn shortly. Yet, as Hynes reminds us, we must remember ‘a Western cultural bias against allowing humor to represent serious and important cultural information’ (Hynes 2009: 13) with our common assumption that ‘if something is comical or entertaining, it cannot represent socially significant [or, we could add, religiously significant] material’ ( Hynes 2009: 4). If nothing else, the trickster allows humour, laughter and play to enter into the hallowed halls of theological discussion for ‘the trickster’s humor melds entertainment and education. We may laugh, but a deeper unfolding is at work. At one level the trickster bears the gift of laughter, but it is tied to another level, linked to another gift, one that enables insight and enlightenment’ (Hynes 2009: 205/6). In this respect certain mid-twentieth century commentators wanted to recover the importance of play in social, philosophical and even theological contexts. Most notable amongst these was the Dutch academic Johan Huizinga whose mid-century ‘Homo Ludens’ (Huizinga 1949) had a lasting effect on the emergence of the nascent discipline of ‘play studies’. Like Hymes, Huizinga stressed the difficulty of categorising play and how it eludes facile intellectual classification: ‘the fun of playing resists all analyses, all logical interpretation. As a concept it cannot be reduced to any other mental category. No other modern language known to me has the exact equivalent of the English “fun”’ (Huizinga 1949: 3). However Huizinga was at pains to distinguish his ‘play’ or ‘fun’ from the more tricksterist ‘folly’, for him play could not really embrace the more extreme liminal aspects of the latter:

The category of the comic is certainly connected with folly in the highest and lowest sense of that word. Play, however, is not foolish. It lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly. The later Middle Ages tended to express the two cardinal moods of life – play and seriousness – somewhat imperfectly by opposing folie to sense, until Erasmus in his Laus Stultitiae showed the inadequacy of the contrast’. (Huizinga 1949: 6)

 The other important twentieth century voice in the development of a Christian understanding of play was Hugo Rahner who in his ‘Man at Play or Did you ever practise eutrapelia’ (Rahner 1965) wanted to use the writings of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle to baptise a Christian sense of play and humour as a middle way between the fool and the dullard, this he would do by promoting the idea of ‘the eutrapelos man’ who ‘strikes the happy mean between the “bomolochos”, the inveterate “funny man”, the buffoon and the “agrokos”, the humourless man who never as much as smiles’ (Rahner 1965: 2). Following Aquinas and Aristotle he argued that ‘unmitigated seriousness’ reveals a lack of virtue on account of the fact that it ‘despises play’ (Rahner 1965: 2). Thus Rahner’s ‘eutrapelic Christians’ are able to stand between the two extremes of loutishness and priggishness, expressing a refined joy in the pleasure of the divine game upon earth.

However, from the psycho-spiritual perspective presented here, both of these influential accounts miss something of the wilder trickster energy which we have traced so far in this chapter. For, with respect to Huizinga and Rahner, the trickster figure does not always appear as an English gentleman out for fair play and a good game. The trickster, as liminal figure, transforms through the wilder and sometimes dangerous breaking of boundaries demanded from their altered perspective on the borderline of time and eternity, limit and boundlessness, life and death.