Perfect Clumsiness: An Interview with András Visky

by J. Clayton Johnsonwith András Visky

Edited by Ailisha O’Sullivan

András Visky spent his early childhood in a Communist gulag along with his mother and six brothers and sisters, while his father, a minister in the Hungarian Reformed Church, was in prison elsewhere, sentenced by the Romanian Communist government to 22 years for alleged crimes and subversion. As an adult, he became a political dissident and incurred the attention of the Securitate, the Romanian secret police.

Now in his forties, András is a published poet, playwright, and essayist, and is the founder of the Koinónia publishing house. He is the dramaturg of the State Hungarian Theatre in Cluj, Romania, and an associate professor in aesthetics at the University of Babeş-Bolyai, also in Cluj. His play Juliet has been playing in Budapest since fall of 2002 at the Thália Theatre. Two newer plays, The Escape and The Alcoholics are premiering later this year in the Romanian cities of Târgu Mureş and Sepsiszent György respectively. His most recent play, The Unborn, is a stage adaptation of Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész (winner of the Nobel prize for literature, 2002). He lives in Cluj with his wife and four children.

Recently, András sat down with Clay Johnson from The New Pantagruel and was kind enough to answer a few questions.

The New Pantagruel:

I know that your father is a minister in the Hungarian Reformed Church and your entire family suffered for religious reasons under the Communist regime in Romania. How were you led from this background to the theatre?

Barry Moser, “Ecce Homo”

ANDRÁS VISKY:

It was the Church which led me to the theatre and then from the theatre I got back to the Church. My father’s sermons became the theatre for me, in the holiest sense of the word, for I couldn’t find an explanation for what was going on in the church during his sermons. I heard great sermons from him, many that I can remember, even now, and I still feel the great joy of hearing his voice and of seeing him. It is something that keeps me near faith.

I only got to know my father when I was seven years old and he was released from prison where he had spent exactly seven years. He knew me but I didn’t know him. As a child, I was also a prisoner and I was released about the same time. I spent five years in a Romanian gulag, a village which had been built by the prisoners and which – I know this from the older prisoners – was built in the shape of a hammer and sickle right on the eastern side of the Romanian desert and next to the Danube Delta. Our relationship was not a traditional father and son relationship. I would say it resembled that relationship which we all have with God. He knows us but we don’t know Him, yet after a while an encounter happens and we come to know Him. My father stepped out of the “there is” into the “I am.” Our getting to know each other is equivalent for me with the event of the liberation, of being set free.

The New Pantagruel:

So you grew up listening to your father preach.

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes. It was in listening to my father in the sounding and resounding space of the church, I suddenly realized that the words were happening, they were coming true, and that they could be as real as the pews or the windows through which one could see a part of the sky. And not simply because passages from the Bible were interpreted in different ways in different sermons – this was also interesting, of course; it spoke to me about the text as something inexhaustible and endless and unfathomable. But what was even more interesting was the way in which the repeated liturgical formulas, the blessing of Aaron for example, were always the same and at the same time totally different. My father raised his hand to give the blessing and then he began to recite the text. In this moment something real happened, just in the moment when he made that gesture and spoke, something which enthralled me and in which I recognized the evidence of God’s existence. One could not separate the word from the gesture, the gesture from the word, the sound from the silence and the message from the form of the message. An amazing moment: terrible and at the same time consoling. It could be seen and felt and experienced clearly that creation was good, was full of love, and that there was a purpose in it that took care of all. That’s what I wanted to know more about. No, not know, I’d rather say, I wanted to expose myself to it.

The New Pantagruel:

How did you get from there to the theatre?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

You know, if we want to know something about God’s almightiness, the church is the place where we’ll find out the least about it. In the church and in the congregation, almightiness is only a word that is explained by other words, words that are themselves explained by still other words, and so on. The speaker, of course, sooner or later says “amen” because, maybe, he gets hungry or because he has to perform the same speech somewhere else or because his time has run out and he cannot stretch the word. (laughs)

The New Pantagruel:

But can words be explained without words?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

According to the idea of the classical Reformation – sacra scriptura sui ipsius interpres – Holy Scripture is its own interpreter – we might think, yes, with words, of course, how else? But I would say that holy scripture can only be interpreted by holy scripture. Everything else is just talking around the point, purposely, in such a way as to avoid it.

The New Pantagruel:

Explain that a bit more.

ANDRÁS VISKY:

I was afraid you would say that! You know, we are interpreting the Bible as a text. We don’t interpret the Bible as a revelation. What does revelation mean? We need a revelation to interpret revelation. We always need it. Always. You know in John’s Gospel, the story of how John and Peter run to the tomb on Easter Sunday and at the end it says that John believed the scriptures. But what does it mean that he believed the scriptures? He didn’t believe them before? It’s not true. But something miraculous happened. A total and deep, essential changing of their relationship with the scriptures. We don’t believe the scriptures. We know the scriptures. It’s great to know the scriptures, I’m convinced of this, but knowing, we don’t believe the scriptures. For example, there is a parable of the man who is spreading the seeds. Do you remember?

The New Pantagruel:

The parable of the sower?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes, the most clear and most simple parable of the Bible. Because other parables, you know, like where there are ten coins and one is missing – the meaning is not so clear. But the parable with the seeds, it’s very clear, very straightforward. These seeds fall here, and those there, and this soil means this and so on, and Jesus explains all of this very clearly to those around Him. But afterwards, His disciples come to Him and say, explain the parable to us. Why? Why? Because if Jesus says something, I cannot understand it without Him. Because He is telling Himself, you know?

The New Pantagruel:

He is telling Himself?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes, He includes Himself in the words. In other words, I cannot understand Him without being in communion with Him. If I understand Him, and am not in communion with Him, I don’t understand Him. This is the Judas story. The Judas story is to understand Him without being in communion with Him. For me, it’s so great that the disciples realize that they understand this parable in a suspiciously easy way. “Let’s ask Him,” they say. “It can’t be that simple. Let’s ask Him.” To be frightened by the simplicity and to tell Him, “No, this is not so simple. I can see in my life that this is not so simple. Not so simple at all.” It’s so simple in our life? It’s not. Give us Your whole body. Give Yourself to me together with this parable. To believe the scriptures, what does it mean? To not believe so easily my understanding of the scriptures. Not to be so speedy. (laughs)

The New Pantagruel:

This means to believe in the scriptures and not to believe in “what the scriptures tell us”, but to believe in the scriptures themselves, saying, “we don’t know what this is but we believe”?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes, because I believe in You.

The New Pantagruel:

Because when you say you believe in what the scriptures told you, you’re reducing the revelation to some idea that you can hold.

ANDRÁS VISKY:

And you are using the scriptures as a tool. But I am a tool in the hand of the scriptures. I am the tool. I am the tool through the grace of the Spirit. I am always the tool. Let’s take Hosea, for example. Many consider him the greatest poet of the Old Testament and I’d add to this that, along with Ezekiel, he’s one of the greatest performers. He has to live in the most absurd and scandalous way. As a prophet of God and of the chosen people, he has to marry a prostitute, Gomer, whom he is not even allowed to touch. Then he has to give horrible names to his children, his children whom he loves as much as we love our children, even as Mary loved Jesus. But perhaps the most shocking thing is that Hosea’s book is part of the canon, it is one of the holy books of the Scripture. In Hosea’s story, God makes a performance before the eyes of the people in which word and person, speech and act cannot be separated. The word happens, actually takes place, and this has nothing to do with a comforting, sleep-inducing, and euphemistic morality. Hosea has to once and for all step out of the drowsiness of words, of dogmatics, of definitions and also, out of his own comfort. He must expose himself – I want to emphasize this – he must expose himself to the attacks of his aggressive and power-mad contemporaries who think that they are chaste and pure.

The New Pantagruel:

The man chosen by God, God’s prophet, has to live as a sinner and so the church rejects him. It’s completely upside down.

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Completely upside down! I’m always looking for those places in the world where God, almightiness, love, meaning, form, death, resurrection and redemption are not just words, but are non-words; that is to say, where they are related to another kind of reality. The idea that the Scripture interprets itself is not self-evident at all. And if there is anyone for whom it is self-evident, then he or she has no idea what the speaking text means, has no immediate experience of it. So, he is compelled to put the commentary, the dogma, the archeology above the text and the text above God. The self-interpreting text is nothing but “text-olatry” if a person, the “I am,” does not show up to interpret it and whose voice can be heard in the text and who is, by His essence, the reality itself.

The New Pantagruel:

By text-olatry, you mean worshipping the text?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Worshipping the text and worshipping my own understanding of it. Theology, theo logus is to be in dialogue with God. How can we be in dialogue with God without feeling our limitation in this dialogue? And how can we be transformed without being touched by the Holy Spirit and receiving the gift of understanding? You know what I mean? But for us, understanding is the starting point. For us, understanding is something very natural, a given part of being human. I don’t believe this. Understanding is the work of the Holy Spirit. It comes from outside. And by not speaking about the limitations of theology, we spread messages about a limited God. You know, I believe that Derrida is a very important mirror for Christianity, a very important mirror. And we have to accept this mirror. The way he speaks about the dissemination of the meaning, the disappearing of the meaning – it’s a very important teaching about not trying to keep back the meaning and to use it again. Don’t use it again because you will get another, a fresh one. Like in the Old Testament, how they had not to keep the manna for the next day. It is the same image. You cannot use it. I can smell the overused manna in our churches. It’s very smelly, you know, like a lot of very smelly preachings. (laughs)

The New Pantagruel:

Talk to me some more about this other kind of reality.

We shouldn’t think for a moment that if Christ was our contemporary we wouldn’t censor Him or we wouldn’t kill Him. Especially since we know that we did kill Him, and not only on the cross, but in Auschwitz, in the death camps that are patented as products of the industrial development, of the modern, civilized society.

ANDRÁS VISKY:

In the theatre, or more generally speaking, in our encounter with art – or let’s take my earlier example: during the sermon that happens to us – we have the possibility of sharing in the gift of the present time. We become contemporaries of God and of Creation. That is to say, we suddenly feel our everyday life, which is so fragmentary and fragile and exposed to suffering and death, to be eternal. For me, the “Christ-event” is also a kind of experiment by God to make His people and of course, the whole creation, His contemporaries. The Hungarian word “contemporary” is a compound word in which time and fellowship are joined together. The gift of the present. If we are brave enough and afraid in the proper way, we can see that His grace means that we become fellows of God in Christ who showed us His humanity in His suffering and weakness.

The New Pantagruel:

How does this inform our interaction with the secular world?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Well, the repeated appeal of Christian theology and mission is that we should exercise an influence on non-Christian and secularized culture and art. Some of my English speaking friends are using a very strong word for this: we are supposed to impact the culture. But if we take a work of art for what it is, that is, simply a work of art and not for, let’s say, a kind of tactical weapon, like a Trojan horse, then we must admit that we as Christian people have rejected the aesthetic understanding of the world. Or we might say that we have become rather abstinent, aesthetically, for the sake of our false comfort.

My experience is that if theological and aesthetical ways of speaking come into conflict with each other, nothing good results. They become enemies and, what’s more, they censor each other. I am convinced that Christianity or Christian faith should expose itself to be impacted by the surrounding world and culture. If God is almighty, we don’t experience this the most in the church, but in such places where there is no room for Him. Where His almightiness shines through the events like a flash of lightning. You know, the church is not God’s censor, but it seems to me that nowadays, this is how it acts. It behaves as if it is God’s censor. So we say that art outside of the church is not art for a Christian. But inside the church you cannot find art. You cannot, for the most part, find art. Christian culture is simply not present in the contemporary artistic or literary scene so one cannot expect to exercise an influence on it like, let’s say, with a bomb. According to the English-Hungarian dictionary, to impact means to hit, like with a bomb, for example. To hit with a bomb! (laughs)

The New Pantagruel:

So you think this idea of impacting the culture doesn’t work?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

You know, I believe that when Jesus is present, the world is not divided in two, we here, together with Jesus, and those people over there who don’t believe in Him. It’s divided in two in a different way. Jesus is here and all of us we are on the other side and it’s His grace to invite us to be with Him. This is the Gospel. The Gospel speaks about this. It’s not my idea. If you are invited by Him, by Jesus, I am sure that you would not be prepared and you would not believe that He invited you. “Me? I visited You as a prisoner? I don’t remember this.” In other words, the church life has to speak about this, that I don’t believe that I believe. And to “impact the culture” – this is not a real issue now for Christianity. My message to Christianity now is not to impact the culture. My message to Christianity is to be impacted by the culture, to offer itself a little bit to be impacted. How can we impact the culture without ourselves creating a valuable culture, without having valuable artists? How can we impact the culture by just reacting to Derrida and Levinas? First of all, we need to read them and understand them in a deep way, to put them in the tradition of their narrative and try to understand them. It’s not the time to impact the culture. We would impact the culture only if we would accept to be impacted by the culture. And in being open to being impacted by the non-Christian culture, there is a possibility that we can meet the almighty God. You know, I am sure that if Mozart was our contemporary we would keep his music out of the reach of our children, we would surely not play his songs in our churches. Are we ready to receive from a modern day Mozart?

The New Pantagruel:

To receive what?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

The sovereignty of God. God gives talent where He wills. Do we have a sovereign God? If we do have a sovereign God, we can see very well that this sovereign God creates amazing works of art through uncommitted Christians or through those who are not members of my church. And? And I can’t be the censor of God. The whole church was a censorship of Jesus. All the people around Jesus were His censors, except those who were blind, who were lepers. Who are those who don’t censor Jesus? Only the blind, the lepers, the mute, the prostitutes, because they have no reason to do so. But we do.

The New Pantagruel:

They have no reasons?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

They have no reasons because they are at the edge of their lives, the edge of their existence. Help my unbelief. I believe, but help my unbelief. Do we believe? Help my unbelief.

We shouldn’t think for a moment that if Christ was our contemporary we wouldn’t censor Him or we wouldn’t kill Him. Especially since we know that we did kill Him, and not only on the cross, but in Auschwitz, in the death camps that are patented as products of the industrial development, of the modern, civilized society. I will not talk about the Romanian gulag because that was an atheist experiment. But Auschwitz was a Christian “experiment” and more than that, as the archives show, it was an ecumenical one. To kill the chosen people is a clear sign that we would kill Jesus. The church is not the club of those who would not kill Jesus. Our instinctive identification, as Christians, is always with the disciples and not with the betrayer. But no one betrays Jesus but the church. A non-Christian doesn’t betray Jesus. A non-believer doesn’t. It’s not possible. Logically, it’s not possible. Who betrays Jesus? The church betrays Him. The church is Judas.

The New Pantagruel:

Let me bring you back to the theatre again, okay?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Okay, for me, it’s very okay. You know, Leonardo DaVinci says about the church building that it is teatro da udire messa, that is, the theatre where we hear the mass. To hear the Word: the condition for this is that first, we must be cured of our deafness. And this is not a single, one-time event, it’s not a condition that can be fulfilled once and for all. Hearing begins with healing. “He who has ears to hear, let him hear,” but the one who is addressed usually does not hear. How many congregations from the book of Revelation survived, remained alive? If I remember correctly, not even one. We should notice that God’s word here also refers to writing – “Write in a book,” John is commanded – but understanding refers to hearing: he who has ears to hear, will hear.

Barry Moser, “Crucifixion”

The New Pantagruel:

And the theatre …

ANDRÁS VISKY:

And, okay, the theatre. (laughs) In the theatre, we have the possibility to experience the present in its perfectness: our own present. To experience that the infinitive “to be” as not just a part of speech but as something that happens, is happening, personally. That He has revealed Himself as “I am.” Remember Hamlet’s monologue? God changes the question of “To be or not to be” into the question “Should I be or should I not be” and finally into the declaration, “I am.” Jesus goes into death in such a way that He applies the parable of the sparrows to Himself, interpreting the passage in question in a very subtle way. God takes care of the little sparrows. But this doesn’t mean that “not one of them will fall.” The emphasis is put on the continuous present tense of His care, on the grace of His eternal providence, and not on the triumphant survival. And the theatre, the theatre produces works that don’t exist and that cannot be stored or preserved. They can’t survive, if you will. They cannot even be studied, because he who tries to examine them becomes a part of the performance as a viewer. And as soon as the performance has ended, the work of art ceases to exist and disappears. The next performance is not the same as the previous one. The audience is always changing and the state of mind of the performer as well. The context of the text can also change, depending on how the world changes around us, or on the news and false news that the media like to throw between us and the world. So the greatest gift of the theatre is that it still believes in the present, in its own present and in the present of others. This is what I like about the theatre, the fragility of the work of art, the work of art that lets itself fall apart.

The New Pantagruel:

Does this kind of theatre really exist?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes, for sure, it exists. I can see this everywhere even in the worst theatrical performances. Do you know why? Because however good or bad a performance, it cannot eliminate an inherent clumsiness or awkwardness, neither from the creative process nor from the creation itself, which is the performance. János Pilinszky calls this “perfect clumsiness” and it is always present in the theatre because the theatre is a community made up of the performer and of the viewer who is present.

The New Pantagruel:

Perfect clumsiness?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

For example, in theatre, the choreography of aggression is clumsy. Murder on the stage is always a little ridiculous just because the blood is not real blood and the weapon is not a real weapon and the poison is utterly healthy – it’s a cup of herbal tea, let’s say! Bearing this in mind, the debate around the image in the European history of ideas is very interesting because the image and especially, the moving image, film, is really “perfect” and takes the place of real life and of the person claiming to be real.

In contrast, the word or writing is “imperfect.” It’s weak. It is always personal and its aim is the personal existence, the voice, the sound, something that is uncertain and whose coming into existence is never guaranteed. Like the Torah. The Torah has no vowels and needs someone to speak it into existence. It doesn’t exist in an objective way. And it wants to be alive. To read the text aloud is to make a liturgy of it. You know, Kierkegaard asks his readers to read his sermons aloud. It’s related to the idea of presentation and representation. In the representation there is an “I”. But in the presentation, the “I” has to disappear because the text presents itself.

That’s why I like so much the show, the performance. It’s very weak, like the Bible text. The Bible text is not strong in itself. It’s just a text. We can say it’s a perfect text but the perfectness of the Bible text is only strong in its perfect dependency on God, on the Holy Spirit. It needs the Holy Spirit to make it alive and we need the Holy Spirit to understand it.

The New Pantagruel:

Talk a bit more about this idea of presentation and representation.

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Oh, it’s very difficult! But – okay, I will try. The problem of representation is that something happened in the past and the representation is repeating what happened. There is the work of art which disappears and the work of art which is framed. The work of art which disappears, it is a presentation. The work of art which is an object and remains, it is a representation. And the presentation requires my participation at a much higher level than the representation. The presentation tries to destroy the border between the work of art and the receiver, to try to invite the receiver to be a part of the work of art. The presentation of a work of art is very connected to what Attila Tordai [of art studio PROTOKOLL in Cluj, Romania] and his group of people are doing. You know, to not to have a work of art in an objective way, but just in a present way, –

The New Pantagruel:

You mean, in a present tense way, it exists just for right now?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes, it exists for right now and then it disappears. Like in the theatre. The theatrical performance, it’s a work of art but it doesn’t exist. It exists only in the present time. I am here, you are there, and then it’s over. Completely ephemeral. No frame. It can’t be mounted on the wall. It can’t be done again. If you record it, you get a different work. It’s just a document of the performance. Or like the difference between being at a concert and just listening to a recording. Gadamer speaks about –

The New Pantagruel:

Who is this?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Hans-Georg Gadamer, the most important hermeneut of the twentieth century, in his book – I am sure it must have been translated into English – Truth and Method. He says you cannot separate the truth from the method because the method would also influence the truth.

The New Pantagruel:

Like Heisenberg.

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes. And he speaks about preaching. It’s a very interesting part. There is a chapter titled, I don’t know the English, something like “The Aesthetic Object is Always in Time.” Which means that it requires me, the receiver, in order to exist. It doesn’t exist in an objective way and the theatre speaks about this because if no one would go to see the performance, the performance would not be presented to the empty theatre. But a film could be presented to an empty theatre. You could leave it running all the time, but not the performance. Because for the performance, the audience is an organic part. The theatre is at least two people, one performing to another. This is presentation. The presentation is a total other form [sic.] than the representation, you know what I mean? Which allows the work of art to disappear, to not exist. Like the meanings. To disappear and to re-begin. To recreate the meanings. To offer yourself, as audience or actor or viewer in order to be recreated through the meanings and so on.

The New Pantagruel:

So, it’s very weak and free at the same time?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes, it’s very weak. That’s why I like so much the show, the performance. It’s very weak, like the Bible text. The Bible text is not strong in itself. It’s just a text. We can say it’s a perfect text but the perfectness of the Bible text is only strong in its perfect dependency on God, on the Holy Spirit. It needs the Holy Spirit to make it alive and we need the Holy Spirit to understand it.

The New Pantagruel:

This takes us back to text and language. So what’s the reason that the language of the Christian faith can not be easily understood so that it might even be considered worthless?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

You know, Christianity, or if you like, Jewish-Christian thought, is an “event,” it is not just words. More precisely, it’s an event or an act of liberation, of being set free. Only in this way is it legitimate. This event can become a story that can be told. When the event is no longer present, the stories, even if they are about liberation, become empty. They become empty or simply recede into the past. They become fictions, myths. The event is the best interpreter of the scripture, not theology or hermeneutics. Of course we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that we don’t need theology. We need it, but it is completely useless if it doesn’t spring from such an event. Theology for me is not the art of understanding but rather of conversation, of amazement that the bush burns but it doesn’t burn away, it is not consumed. There is no explanation for this and theology is not called to explain this wonder, this is not the task of theology. And when I say that theology is the art of conversation, I also say that it is a conversation that goes on between God and man and in such a way that a third person cannot be shut out of it.

The New Pantagruel:

What might this look like in an everyday way?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

I really don’t know. But there is a short – very short! – period in history where I like to stop, to linger. This is Good Friday. Only at this point can the work of art and the interpretation of the scripture come into existence, come alive, in order to force the hand of God – there is no other possibility – to contact God, the personally existent, and to entrust the work of resurrection to Him.

The New Pantagruel:

How do you mean, to force the hand of God?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Because, look at the disciples on Good Friday. The Messiah is gone. And they don’t know what to do, they hide. Because Friday afternoon, the afternoon of the crucifixion, all of our thoughts are about death and we forget every promise about the resurrection. It is unbelievable.

The New Pantagruel:

That we forget the promises about the resurrection or that the resurrection happened?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

That we forget the promises. It is unbelievable but this is our life, to forget all the promises. Those three chapters from John where He talks about His departure and return – how can they forget this? They forget because the death is so obvious, so real, so natural, so present, that you can feel it. It seems that we, today, don’t feel the death. And the question is, if we don’t feel the death, do we feel the resurrection?

It seems to me that we, the church today, have forgotten those three days in between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We never speak about those three days because the Gospels are mainly silent about them. As if to cut out from the history of the cosmos those three days. And it seems that we today have forgotten them totally. But from my perspective, a good and accurate representation of the already-not-yet could be that period. To touch with one hand, if you want, Good Friday and to touch with the other hand, Easter Sunday.

The New Pantagruel:

To touch with faith or belief, or with what?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

To touch with our hand (laughs), because these other words are too nice. Faith is a good word but we have to add something to it. In this period, in these hours after the crucifixion and before the resurrection, there is no faith. There is a coming faith. Faith is on the way. But it’s not there yet. There’s a secret in this disciples story. Why, for example, do they stay together? It is not a logical thing to do, to remain together when you are being persecuted. I remember during the time of persecution in Romania, the worst situation always was to be found together. Because this was seen as a conspiracy by the authorities.

I just want to underline something. It seems that we, the church, know very well the end of the story and this is very suspicious to me. To know very well the end of the story is to forget the beginning of the story. To focus so much on the end of the story, is to consider myself as a natural partner in, or character of, the end of the story. But according to our doctrines, this is known only by God.

THE NEW PANTAGRUEL:

Why He would choose me, for example?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes, for example. In what way am I a character of this Gospel story? Or not? There is a lack of fear and trembling, and because of this lack of fear and trembling there is no openness toward someone who lives in fear and trembling for other reasons. What kinds of other reasons? Ecological reasons, for instance. For me personally, for example, the ecological future of the earth today is a source of fear. I asked my wife recently, was it wise to have children or not? Why bring children into such a world? When everything in this garden is destroyed and poisoned. When it is very hot and everything is so dry and I can see from my study window this suffering of my garden, of nature, not suffering because of itself but because of me. For me it’s a real problem, a real fear, and this fear and trembling is a possibility of the real encountering.

The New Pantagruel:

Between ourselves and other people? Or with God as well?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

With God as well, but we talk about other people now. You know, we are so superior. We see someone living in a sort of fear, or angst, and tell them it’s because of sin, because of their sin. Which is not sure – maybe it’s because of my sin. We don’t share our fears with the world. We share only our triumphs. And for me, this is suspicious. I don’t see in our church life that there are so many reasons to not go out and represent in the life of the world this journey in the wilderness. We are living in a desert and the church is a representation of the journey, of the exile, of in-between-ness. It’s a representation of going out and maybe that’s why the church in this age or in the age of classical modernity had or has big problems with art in general. Because the work of art represents this in-between-ness always. Always.

The New Pantagruel:

So we’re frightened.

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes.

The New Pantagruel:

In other words, the work of art recalls this fear and trembling with which we are uncomfortable and with which we are now out of touch?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

And that’s why in our churches there is no room for art. It’s very interesting that in the church we would accept only those artists who do not seem dangerous for us. It seems to me that the history of the church and also the Bible, the canon, speaks about at least two possible approaches of the problem of revelation: one theological and one aesthetical. Why can we find the Songs of Solomon in the Bible, these love songs? Why are they included in the canon? Or if we consider the book of Romans – which is a theological explanation of the unity of revelation from Genesis until the book of Romans – if we consider Romans together with, say, the book of Revelation, which is an aesthetical approach of the end times. There is a sort of balance, it seems to me, the theological with the aesthetical, and they have to go together, for each to be a mirror to the other, however poor the mirror.

The New Pantagruel:

So, the theological and the aesthetical correspond in a rough way, to say, the Torah and the Talmud? To the written tradition and to the oral tradition of Judaism?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, the approach of revelation through terminology, through abstractions, through the language of science, which is how modernity considers theology – as a science – which is today a little bit problematic after Heidegger, for instance. It’s a little bit problematic to focus on terminology, to define, to make a definition and to use it in an accurate way. This can be great but all theological description of the revelation has to speak about its own limitations. Do you understand? To speak about the limitations. Because, if it would speak about its limitations, there is a possibility of receiving messages from outside. I had a discussion with a young man in Chicago about Derrida and someone writing in reaction to Derrida, in response to Derrida, and I suggested to not respond to Derrida, but to integrate Derrida. I know that at first glance this might seem very heretical. Could we integrate postmodernity in our theological thinking? But how were we able to integrate modernity? I cannot understand why modernity is more acceptable to us than postmodernity. Modernity created science as a god against a personal God. It was not postmodernity which did this. Maybe for theological thinking, this temptation is obvious, the temptation to create a structure without speaking about the limitations of this structure. Theology is a narrative of the limitations.

THE NEW PANTAGRUEL:

Okay, I want to go back to Good Friday.

ANDRÁS VISKY:

And this is what we always have to come back to. You know, we are living in the period between Good Friday and the day of resurrection. I’ve come to the conclusion that the theatre, the work of art in the largest sense of the word, knows something about Good Friday which we have forgotten. Samuel Beckett, who was perhaps the only Christian writer of the second half of the last century, speaks very much about this place. He reformulated Christian eschatology, our hopeless hope of waiting, and he did this with unbelievable sharpness and objectivity.

I had a commission from a State Theatre in Hungary a few years ago to write a play about Easter. And this idea came to me to write a play about the disciples in this period between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. [Disciples.] The Messiah has gone, they don’t know where, and they are very scared and confused and they are waiting for something or someone. They have some memories of things Jesus said and did, but these memories seem meaningless now. They have to re-begin.

The New Pantagruel:

Re-begin their faith life – or what?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Their life, their whole life. You know, they had suffered some things when they were with Jesus, when He was still with them, and He had taken care of them but this is all in the past. They have to convince God to enter into this present moment with them. So they try to piece together what happened, to try to understand how they got to this place. And they stage a series of little plays inside the main play as they try to reconstruct their life with Jesus. Was He real or not? Was He who they thought He was or not? Did any of the things they remembered actually happen? And retelling their stories to one another, they realize, “This was very real. This actually happened with me. I can’t deny this. But He is dead. We saw Him die. What to do now?”

Good Friday is the place where we should return, again and again, so as to depend only on God, letting all knowledge and all stories go. This is the place and the state that invites God to act, to intervene in our lives. Good Friday is the best time for this meeting in history which shows God as an acting, active God.

The New Pantagruel:

I can see why Good Friday can be a “good” place to be, but why should we purposely go back there?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

You know, Jesus is resurrected, yes, but Jesus is also still on the cross. And if I want to be with Him, I have to go where He is. To arrive at a Good Friday is a gift from God, an invitation from God to re-begin my life with Him. It’s a big gift from God if I realize that I have to re-begin my life. God is so rich that He doesn’t permit us to use blessings from the past. He wants to share with us blessings from the present. His presence is out of time, which means it is a continuous presence. He overcomes time in this way. And even those experiences of past blessing are nothing when you are in a new trouble. It doesn’t help. You have to tell God, these past experiences are not tools in my hand. My hands are empty again and again and again. Why doesn’t God speak to us through the Bible? Because we know everything and our hands are not empty. We cannot listen to His voice because between Him and me there is a Bible passage. My hands have to be empty. To say to God at the beginning of the day, I will open the Bible and I want to be taught by You, not by my knowledge about the Bible.

The New Pantagruel:

And the theatre is somehow speaking about all of this?

ANDRÁS VISKY:

Yes, yes. You know, the history of European theatre begins with the empty tomb. The first theatrical representations used the liturgy as a starting point. Or more precisely, the visiting of the empty tomb. In these early plays, the Marys are going to the tomb in order to meet the dead Jesus and they are asking the angels where the dead body is. And we, we too cannot find the resurrected body so we are always looking for a dead body, returning to the tomb. This is our general condition, to search for dead bodies.

Because we have to go back to the beginning. Always re-beginning. Where is the Messiah? What happened? John and Peter run to Jesus’ tomb in their desperation. They don’t know what they will find there. And John himself tells us that when they entered the tomb, the scriptures were resurrected. Had they not understood anything of the scriptures before this? But they had to throw out all of their previous understandings and re-begin.