Performing as Transformation: The Theo-drama of Conversion in Contemporary Artists

ABSTRACT: The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar’s magisterial work, Herrlichkeit, devotes Volume IV (The Action) to his innovative notion of Theo-Drama. He presents the drama of salvation as written and directed by God on the grand stage of the created universe, where we are invited to “act,” to find and to play our role in God’s theater. The drama is thus the context in which singular, individual lives have ultimate significance, a transcendence of one’s finite freedom through making decisions that carry eternal weight, especially in religious conversion. Von Balthasar argues that artists through Christian history have had the ability to perform beauty (an attribute of God) and to transform others. Often, artists who engage with this form of Christian life find themselves transformed in their embrace of something beautiful. Artists have the predisposition of “seeing the form” and thus conforming their lives, their art, to this vision. The tension is that this theo-drama has been supplanted by what one might call “ego drama,” in which the secular artist directs, writes, and stars in his or her own drama. And yet there have been a series of modern and contemporary artists, whether it be in poetic or dramatic productions, that have found themselves so shaped and formed by the Christian drama of salvation, that their lives are changed, a conversion and conformation to Christ is revealed and realized. This paper will reflect on contemporary artists who have converted to Christianity in and through their artistic endeavors of seeing the Christ-form, playing the Christ-form.

Mark Bosco is a member of the Power of the Word Project Advisory Board. He is Vice President for Mission & Ministry, English Professor, Theology Professor, Georgetown Univeristy Film: Flannery: The Storied Life of the Writer from Georgia (2019). Producer, Director and Writer, with Elizabeth Coffman. Books: Graham Greene’s Catholic Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Flannery O’Connor in Spain: From Andalusia to Andalucía. Editor, with Beatriz Valverde. UJA University Press, Spain and Catholic University of America Press, 2020. Revelation & Convergence: Flannery O’Connor and the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. Editor, with Brent Little. Catholic University of America Press, 2017. Finding God in All Things: Celebrating Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner. Editor, with David Stagaman, S.J. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Academic Novels as Satire: Critical Studies of an Emerging Genre. Editor, with Kimberly Rae Connor. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Journal Articles and Book Chapters Journal Articles and Book Chapters: “The Challenges to Mission and Ministry in the COVID-19 Moment in Jesuit Higher Education.” Jesuit Higher Education: A Journal. Volume 10, Number 1. 2021. “Flannery O’Connor as Baroque Artist: Theological and Literary Strategies.” Chapter in Literature and Catholicism in the 19th and 20th Century, edited by David Tarevell. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021) 124-143. “Catholic Convergences in Deep River.” Chapter in Navigating Deep River: New Perspectives on Shusaku Endo’s Final Novel, edited by Mark W. Dennis and Darren Middleton. (New York: SUNY Press, 2020) 127-148. “Hillbilly Thomist: Understanding Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic Literary Aesthetics in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Chapter in the series, MLA Approaches to Teaching: Flannery O’Connor, edited by Robert Donahoo and Marshal Bruce Gentry (2019) 56-65. “Living on the Frontier of Catholicism: Graham Greene’s Disloyal Conversions.” Chapter in Narratives of Religious Conversion from the Enlightenment to the Present. Special issue of European Journal of English Studies (2019) 41-55. “Walking Hand in Hand—Flannery O’Connor’s Artistic and Spiritual Companions.” English Studies, Vol. 100, No. 5, (2019) 505-510. “The Higher Mathematics of Flannery O’Connor.” Renascence: Essays on Values and Literature, 70, No.1 (Winter 2018) 79-85. “Shades of Greene in Catholic Literary Modernism.” Graham Greene Studies: Volume 1 (2017) 8-23. https://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/ggs/vol1/iss1/10/.