Everyman's Last Rites and the Digression on Priesthood

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SOURCE: McRae, Murdo William. “Everyman's Last Rites and the Digression on Priesthood.” College Literature XIII, no. 3 (fall 1986): 305-09.

[In the following essay, McRae examines Everyman's portrayal of the priesthood.]

Interpreters of Everyman often remark that when V. Wyttes and Knowlege digress on the priesthood, and offstage Everyman receives his last rites, the play exhibits the sacramentalism of the devotio moderna, the movement to reform the church from within that began in the low countries in the late fourteenth century. Since the digression preaches the enduring value of the sacraments as it admonishes priests to lead exemplary lives, it is for Lawrence V. Ryan both “theologically essential” and “dramatically appropriate” (731).1 In a similar vein, Thomas F. VanLaan reads the digression as a remedium to sin, V. Wyttes' naming of the sacraments effecting an “incantatory defeat” (472) of vice.2 Finally, in their authoritative recent edition of the play, Geoffrey Cooper and Christopher Wortham conclude that “Everyman asserts a view of man's spiritual needs which is unmistakably related to the reforming movement” (xxiii), and that the digression anticipates Erasmus, notably in his simultaneous veneration of priestly authority and condemnation of priestly cupidity.3

Although these perspectives are useful, especially for determining the priority of Elckerlijc, none ask the obvious question: why does Everyman visit Presthode offstage for the last rites? At first glance, the answer appears to involve simple dramatic economy. If, as A. C. Cawley argues, Confessyon and Presthode are identical, then Everyman's receiving his last rites onstage would in some measure be an unnecessary repetition of his earlier confession.4 But something far more basic than dramatic economy is involved here. Everyman's visit to Presthode cannot be dramatized because there are implications to what Knowlege and V. Wyttes say about the priesthood that prevent such a visit from being staged. The conversation between V. Wyttes and Knowlege indirectly records the tension in the play between its worldly outlook and its reformist message, with the result that perhaps the most important act of faith Everyman could show, his receiving of the last rites, and especially of holy communion, can never be dramatized.

The digression begins when Knowlege counsels Everyman, who now understands the importance of Good Dedes for his salvation, to receive the “holy sacrament and oyntment togyder” (line 709). This sacramentalist advice is heard again in V. Wyttes' proclaiming that the “preesthode excedeth all other thynge” (line 732) in that the priest “handeleth his Maker bytwene his [handes]” (line 739). V. Wyttes and Knowlege valorize the eucharist in a way that calls to mind Thomas à Kempis in the Imitatio Christi, the spiritual guidebook for the devotio moderna, first published some 50 years before Everyman: “For there is no oblation more worthy, nor satisfaction greater to put away sin, than for a man to offer himself purely and wholly to God, with the offering of the Body of Christ in Mass and in Holy Communion” (240).5 V. Wyttes' concomitant expression that through the eucharist God has given the priest “more power … / Than to ony aungell” (lines 735-36), thus setting the priest “aboue aungelles in degree” (line 749), echoes the Imitatio as well: “[Holy communion] is a great mystery; and great the dignity of priests, to whom it is granted that is not granted to Angels” (236).

As these passages from the Imitatio make clear, there is for the devotio moderna no higher witness to the union between Christ and His church than when the priest, in imitation of Christ, administers holy communion to a faithful and penitent Christian. It is a significant matter, then, for this allegory of every penitent Christian's preparation for death to fail to show an encounter between the character who figures for all those believers and a priest who administers the eucharist to him. Instead, when V. Wyttes ends his comments about the elevated office of the priest, Everyman leaves the stage, his absence to receive communion and extreme unction marked by Knowledge's worldly observations about the priesthood.

In extension of his earlier remarks, Knowlege initially stresses the power of the eucharist, recognizing that on the cross Christ “gaue out … / The same sacrament in grete tourment” (lines 752-53). In this emphasis on the connection between the eucharist and the crucifixion can once again be heard the voice of Thomas à Kempis. “Lo, I offered Myself wholly to My Father for thee,” Christ says in the Imitatio, recalling His crucifixion, “and I gave My Body and Blood to thy meat, that I might be wholly thine and thou Mine” (241). Yet even though he shares with V. Wyttes much the same view of the eucharist, Knowlege articulates a less fervent assessment of priests: “Synfull preestes gyueth the synners example bad” (line 759), especially when they commit the sins of simony and lechery. In fact, in his worldly insight, Knowlege expresses a contempt for simony and lechery no less profound than in Erasmus' colloquy “The Funeral,” a work roughly contemporary with Everyman.6 Erasmus' dialogue tells the story of a priest who attends a sickbed only to accuse the Dominicans and Franciscans who have also assembled there of being simoniacs whose promiscuous behavior with nuns is a public scandal. The bickering among these religious men can be settled only when the dying man assures the priest, no model of the impoverished Christian life, “you shall have money paid out to you for the tolling of the bells, funeral dirges, monument, and burial before you leave this house” (362) and directs also that “a sum of money … be divided equally” (364) among all the orders.

Although his decrying of sinful priests might seem to support Edmund Chambers' mistaken notion that Everyman is a Protestant play,7 the thrust of Knowlege's remarks merely underscores how unworldly is V. Wyttes' exaltation of that office. What Knowlege says is no foundation for a reformation of the church; indeed, none of his remarks about the eucharist anticipates, for example, Luther's arguments against transubstantiation. Knowlege does, however, indirectly voice what by the end of the fifteenth century had become one of Christianity's persistent themes, the need to reform the church from within. Yet within that reformist position itself is a tension between the lofty goal to purify the Church and the worldly recognition that the Church is inhabited by the sinful, and it is precisely this tension which opens the way for two possible onstage encounters between Everyman and Presthode.

In the first possible encounter, Everyman could be ministered to by a Presthode such as V. Wyttes describes him; in the second, by a Presthode such as Knowlege does. However, so long as the play remains true to what both V. Wyttes and Knowlege say about priests, neither possibility could be staged. On the one hand, were Everyman to receive the last rites from a Presthode such as V. Wyttes describes him, then Knowlege's condemnation of sinful priests would at least seem incongruous. That is, it might be in keeping with the goals of the devotio moderna to show Everyman, every Christian man, to receive the last rites from a character who represents V. Wyttes' lofty valuation of priests. But in this possible encounter, the play's universalizing allegory would then teach that every penitent Christian is always attended by an exemplary priest, a lesson which all that Knowlege says about sinful priests would deny. Were Everyman, on the other hand, to receive the last rites from a Presthode such as Knowlege describes him, then V. Wyttes' veneration of that office would seem incongruous. This second possibility would make the allegory defeatist, even cynical, for the play would then teach that all Christians seeking their final rites are always attended by priests who serve only their own mercenary desires, never the needs of the faithful.

A digression only in the formal sense that it marks the absence of the central character, the conversation between V. Wyttes and Knowlege paradoxically occupies the center of the play's vision. As moral treatise, the play urges upon every Christian the humility upon which Thomas à Kempis and Erasmus base their messages. Since it is aware, however, of the need to reform the church from within, the play does not ignore, indeed cannot ignore, that many priests do not lead humble and exemplary lives. In fact, this awareness explains why the playwright could not simply delete what Knowlege says, thereby seeming to eliminate the problem of sending Everyman offstage. Without Knowlege's remarks about priests, the play loses much of the force of its reformist teaching. Yet there is in that teaching an opposition between worldly insight and exalted goal which makes the positions taken by Knowlege and V. Wyttes effectively cancel each other in the sense that if either position were to direct an onstage encounter between Everyman and Presthode, the other would become contradictory in the allegory. Since both positions say much about the world Everyman moralizes, both must be expressed if the play is to remain true to the spirit of the devotio moderna. Their opposition, however, opens a gap in the play through which, in a manner of speaking, Everyman must leave the action, his departure a testament to the pressures which religious reform may exert upon the structure of an allegorical drama.

Notes

  1. “Doctrine and Dramatic Structure in Everyman.” Speculum 32 (1957).

  2. Everyman: A Structural Analysis.” PMLA 78 (1963).

  3. The Summoning of Everyman. Nedlands, W. A.: University of Western Australia Press, 1980. In my text I cite this edition. See also Wortham's “Everyman and the Reformation.” Parergon 29 (April 1981): 23-31.

  4. Cawley, ed. Everyman. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1961: 35-36.

  5. Of the Imitation of Christ. Trans. Richard Whytford (1556). Wilfrid Raynal, ed. New York: Duffield and Company, 1909. The Imitatio was first published in Augsburg, ca. 1471, roughly 25 years before the first edition of Elckerlijc, ca. 1495, and 50 years before the first perfect edition of Everyman, printed by John Skot, ca. 1522-29. On the dating of these texts, see Cooper and Wortham: xxii, xlvi; J. E. G. Montmorency. Thomas à Kempis: His Age and His Book. 1901, rpt. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1970: 118-26.

  6. First printed in 1526. I subsequently cite The Colloquies of Erasmus. Trans. Craig R. Thompson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

  7. English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947: 64. Albeit unintentionally, Chambers correctly described himself when he wrote, “I am no theologian, but the strong emphasis on Good Deeds seems to me to suggest a Protestant temper rather than a Catholic one.”

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