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THE TRAGEDY OF MAN AS THEATRUM THEOLOGICUM (A DRAMATURG’S DIARY)
What sort of world? The Creation and, within it, humanity; that is, in point of
fact, the “seeming contingencies” of always uncontrollable love, and its humor.
With the elimination of Creation, however, God withdraws into abstraction,
since he would give up the inexhaustible love relations linked to his own Work,
in which he himself is mirrored for both humanity and himself. Lucifer is not
a God-denier, but he rejects the fallibility of the human essence, which God
accepts (or accepted at last). He is the ideologue of eugenics and extreme ex¬
periments on humans: here, Madach nicely reports the “perfect” worlds soon
to come: the genocidal and horrific experiments to improve man espoused by
dictatorships of left and right.
Madach’s Lucifer is the product of the Enlightenment and is no longer a
Christian devil, to the extent that he steps radically outside the Christian
system of argument and opposes God with the inevitability of secularization.
But he also realizes that Man will remain homo religiosus as long as he lives,
and thus the religion of science must step in to replace the faith in God.
Structurally, dictatorships are the most religious ages: dethroning and ex¬
iling God is a fundamentally religious deed, and the fear of His power is a
recognition that the exile will certainly return, judging the living and the
dead. According to the Book of Proverbs, however, as I have already stated,
God created the world with an eye on “the child”: humor calls this forth from
time to time out of the “divine order,” because it is part of the essence of order.
Lucifer’s world — perhaps also according to Madach — is that of the religion
of science: a modernist experiment that forms the basis for materialist dia¬
lectic, the annihilating ideology of necessary antagonisms. Which leads, of
course, to the manufacture of ideological antagonisms and to the operation
of laboratories of political communication that, on demand from the Center,
supplied (and of course still supply) the necessary contradiction and with it, the
opponent. The conversation places the Lucifer actors back into the dramatic
arc of the Tragedy: they not only introduce Adam and Eve to history but also
seek to convince them to reject the human continuation of the divine Work,
and not trust in the promise of salvation.
It is an important discussion and, far from hurrying it along, Purcarete be¬
comes absorbed in it and explicates and argues with pleasure — one day before
the premiere. Mephistopheles “is a secularized thinker in whom a poison-pen
liberal journalist got lost,”?° Laszlé Marton writes wittily about Goethe’s devil;
Lucifer is more an offended family member continually reminding his overly
strict father that he also belongs to him, and that it’s not fair that God loves this
unfortunate, constantly-in-thrall-to-its-feelings, pronouncedly sentimental
human couple more than he loves Lucifer. Madach’s Lucifer is a fallen angel,
90 László Márton: Ördög szerződik, Isten eltűnik. Támpontok a Faust értő olvasásához [1he Devil
Draws up a Contract, God Disappears. Bases for a Reading of Faust], in Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe: Faust, trans. László Márton, Pozsony/Bratislava, Kalligram, 2015, 658.
e 271"