sacramental instrumentality: representation, demonstration, and the

SACRAMENTAL INSTRUMENTALITY:
REPRESENTATION, DEMONSTRATION, AND
THE CALDERONIAN AUTO
JOHN SLATER
University of Colorado at Boulder
"I have heard of thee by the hearing of the
ear; but now mine eye seeth thee."
Job 42:5
"jqu6 de Mundo he descubieito
y qui de cosas he visto!"
La segunda esposay triunfar muriendo (437)
Pedro Calderon de la Barca's "memorias de las apariencias" contain
detailed instructions for the construction of the carros upon which his
autos sacramentales are performed; in nearly every instance the playwright insists that the itinerant stages be marvelously perforated with
"guecos" allowing for the "descubrimiento" of signs, symbols, objects,
and actors. Just as the substance of the consecrated Host is at odds with
the accidental nature of its appearance, few things on the stages of the
autos are what they first seem to be: forests divide "dejando descubierto
vn jardin," a tent opens so that "descubra vna persona sentada en vna
silla," a mountain divides in order that "descubra vna gruta," and niches
are continually revealed containing reverential or profane figures
(Shergold and Varey 152, 225, 233).
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One particularly complicated example is the description of the fourth
carro for the 1659 staging of El Maestrazgo del Toison:
El quarto carro a de ser vna nube que se a de abrir en tres querpos de a seys ojas cada uno, debajo de la quai a de verse en pie
vn leon grande echo de pasta. A de abrirse a su tienpo y dentro del se a de ver vn cordero, que tanvien a de abrirse y verse
dentro vn caliz y vna ostia. Esta se a de abrir tanvien y verse
dentro vn nino. Si pudiere ser vivo sera mejor, y si no, sera de
pasta. Avisarase con tienpo para que se le puedan poner versos,
o suplirlos en otra boca, contentandonos con sola la demostracion en la apariencia. (Shergold and Varey 137)
As often happens, the Eucharistic discovery here is twofold; the bread
and wine are uncovered and then their true nature, the real presence of
Christ, is revealed. In this case, the playwright suggests that the "descubrimiento" will lead to a "demostracion," despite the fact that this takes
place only in the "apariencia." Juan Ignacio Castroverde's 1676
"Aprobacion" suggests a similar relationship among the terms "apariencia," "representacion," and "demostracion." He explains that the object of
Calderon's autos is the "sagrada fabrica de hacer los conceptos de Cristo
sacramentado representables y explicarlos con la viva demostracion de
alegorias" (8). This happens, he continues, "con tal armonia que, desestimada la apariencia, se percibe la substancia [...]."'
In both cases the illusion of the "apariencias"—nothing more than effigies in "pasta"—gives way to a very real demonstration, a perception of
"substancia." This points toward the fact that Calderon's sacramental theater, like the anatomical theater that becomes the emblematic locus of scientific activity during the sixteenth century, is home to both a style—theatricality—and an activity—demonstration.^ In fact, early modern natural
philosophers are acutely aware of the similarities between the demonstrative stage of the pubic experiment and the dramatic stage of the playhouse.3 William Harvey warns that bad scientists are like bad playwrights: "And like bad poets, they call this deus ex machina on to their
stage to explain their plot and catastrophe" (cited in Bono 86)."*
Given the anxieties of natural philosophers over the theatrical character of their enterprise, it is worth examining more closely the correspondences between early modem scientific and dramatic theaters. By explor-
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ing the shared strategies employed in one scientific instrument, Robert
Boyle's bell Jar, and an early Calderonian auto. El nuevo palacio del
Retiro, three things become apparent: first, that autos, like scientific
instruments, attempt to overcome the limits of perception to make the
invisible available as spectacle; second, that the amplification of sensory
capability and the subsequent production of knowledge happens both in
the laboratory and on Calder6n's sacramental stage in analogous fashion;
and third, that the context of this achievement of understanding is the theory that human manufacture or construction is the means by which new
knowledge can be gained. In short, I would like to examine the playwright's injunction that the faithful "de dudas pasen a evidencias" to
show that these "evidencias" are produced in a way that recalls scientific
experimentation, and possess a value akin to scientific knowledge (204).5
Alan K. G Paterson calls the auto sacramental "ei genero que celebra
la actualizacion de un mundo invisible" ("Madrid" 194). This fascination
with representing invisibility stems from the fact that the sacrament the
plays commemorate hides an imperceptible mystery: the real presence of
Christ in the Eucharist. In order to enable comprehension, the theater
makes mental concepts manifest, as Castidad expiains in Suefios hay que
verdad son:
Y pues lo caduco no
puede comprender lo etemo,
y es necesario que para
venir en conocimiento
suyo haya un medio visible,
que en el corto caudal nuestro
del concepto imaginado
pase a practico concepto.
Hagamos representable
a los teatros del tiempo [...]. (1215)
This passage begins by declaring the incomprehensibility of the eternal, and ends by employing a strategy for its comprehension. The movement from "concepto imaginado" to "practico concepto" recalls the
essential characteristic of the hypothetical model: to make a concept representable. The model proceeds from "theoretical analysis"—what is conjectured or believed—^to "material action"—^what is seen (Crombie,
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Styles 84). Thus as a didactic technology in the form of dramatic spectacle, the autos function as a model for the exposition of an idea: "Hagamos
representable / a los teatros del tiempo."
"A model," explains A. C. Crombie, "embodies a theory"
("Expectation" 301). The plays concern embodiment on two levels. First,
as Castidad says, they proceed from a theological concept to its concrete
representation. On a second level, the concept represented—^the asunto of
the autos—is the Eucharist itself, the embodiment, or in this case the
incarnation, of an idea: the divine Logos (Wardropper 29). Thus both representatively and conceptually the plays are related to the process by
which ideas become seen.
The comparison between the literary achievements of Calderon and the
utilitarian hypothetical model might seem to trivialize the former, but as
Crombie notes, during the seventeenth century "scientific inquiry and
artistic composition" are "cognate arts of the possible and the soluble"
{Styles 43-44). Thus the autos can be characterized as the meeting point
between a theory, usually in the form of a theological argument, and the
mastery of dramatic resources, or in Crombie's terms the "self-conscious
combination of rational analysis with ingenious contrivance" (Styles
425).
Castroverde's description of the autos shows in part how the plays are
understood by Calderon's contemporaries as constructed artifacts that
might produce understanding. He begins with language that underscores
the constructed nature of the plays: an auto is the "sagrada fdbrica de
hacer los conceptos de Cristo sacramentado representables" (8; emphasis
mine). The word "fabrica" reflects a fundamental preoccupation during
the Baroque period; as Amos Funkenstein asserts, "knowledge of construction" becomes a "mark of human knowledge" in the seventeenth
century, "epitomized in the mathematical physics that showed not only
how things are structured, but also how they are made" (12). Thus "fabrication," instead of implying falsification, can connote access to true
knowledge about the natural world. The preoccupation with the constructed nature of the world and its contents is tied up with the act of making theory and concept representable; the contrivances for achieving this
representability in science and art involve the utilization of analogous
technologies.
Generally, the word fdbrica has three related but distinct uses: first, to
describe a work made by human hands, as in this case an auto\ second and
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third, the divine works of the world and the body, respectively.^ All three
of these uses are collapsed in El gran teatro del mundo, when Autor
addresses Mundo as "la fabrica feliz del universo": Mundo is simultaneously a body (the character), the world (El Mundo), and, because the
world is "teatro," a dramatic work (203). Aurora Egido points out that the
theater as fabrica exists as middle term between the world and the body,
and in speaking about the theater it is seemingly irresistible to employ
language that conveys this (Lafabrica 60)J
The autos, however, do not slavishly mirror the world or the body.
Although Calder6n's comedias also evidence little preoccupation over
Aristotle's injunctions concerning the plausibility of drama—^the unities
of time, place, and action—^the autos show a particular disregard for representing a credible world, taxing verisimilitude well beyond reasonable
belief 8 Instead, the playwright's Eucharistic plays posit and manipulate
conditions for the replication of certain characteristics of nature in order
to make otherwise imperceptible phenomena visible, "corriendo / de Io
visible a Io invisible" (1345). In tiiis sense, the staging of the auto—in
Castroverde's terms the making of "conceptos [...] representables"—is
like the manufacture—the fabrica, or "Fabrick" as Boyle puts it—of a
scientific instrument (Boyle 329).^ Both the plays and laboratory appurtenances have a didactic utility, and both contrive to create or isolate conditions to make very particular aspects of the world available as spectacle. The sublimity of watching the quick and dead be judged in an auto
such as El nuevo palacio del Retiro may seem very different from that of
observing a finch suffocate in an evacuated bell jar, but in each case the
rules of nature must be suspended artificially to allow for viewing. In
other words, the plays serve as an "artifact" that models a theory or belief
by "imitating and extending the natural original," a fabricated environment that facilitates seeing, just as Boyle's famous vacuum does
(Crombie, Styles 43).
The relationship of autos to what is seen in the mind on the one hand,
and what is perceived by the eye on the other—Castidad's "concepto
imaginado" and "prdctico concepto"—^has led critics to compare the
plays to divergent styles of representation, notably sermons and paintings. The partial definition of the autos as "sermones / puestos en verso"
in the loa to La segunda esposa y triunfar muriendo has inspired a number of intriguing conjectures on the relationship of the plays to contemporaneous homiletics (427). Egido, for example, points out that the "la
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concepcion religiosa del tiempo homologa el escenario con el piilpito,"
but observes that the stage possesses significant "ventajas efectistas y
didacticas" that lead to a "realizacion total" of hortatory effects {La fabrica 97, 100). Barbara Kurtz extends this analysis by subtly inverting the
nature of the comparison; autos are not only like sermons in that both utilize many of the same rhetorical conventions, but also because Baroque
sermons attempt to produce visual effects: sermons aim "not at the doctrinal exposition or even moralizing admonition one might expect in an
oratorical genre, but rather at the emotionally powerful visualization of
exemplary deeds" (44).
Kurtz suggests a further context for the act of seeing the performance
of an auto, demonstrating that the language of the autos often employs
terminology—such as "visos" and "lejos"—borrowed from painting (5356). She notes: "Contemporaneous speculation on painting and perspective conventionally maintained that a picture space is not so much a representation of what the painter sees as a rationalized structuring of perception itself. As logical extension, allegory in a similar fashion may not
so much present visually 'what is there' as rationalize it, make it accessible to human reason, through its metaphors and their quotidian realia"
(54). Still further, Kurtz examines the use of painterly language to
describe the Eucharist itself (55-56), but she stops short of considering
what it might mean for the transubstantiated body of Christ to be put, as
Francis Bacon would say, "under the vexations of art."
There is a great deal of evidence to show that paintings are not only as
Kurtz says "rationalized structuring of perception itself," but understood
to be tools that illuminate the act of perception, and that art is, as Svetlana
Alpers remarks, "a program for [...] the production of basic knowledge
about the world" (109). Alpers further explains: "Attentive looking, transcribed by the hand—what might be called the observational craft—led
to the recording of the multitude of things that make up the visible world.
In the seventeenth century this was celebrated as giving basic access to
knowledge and understanding of the world" (72). This is a baroque development, rejecting the notion that a good painting is properly deceptive, as
it is in the art theory of antiquity (Long 64). As Pamela O. Long shows,
"[ojbjects of art and objects of nature, having lost their ancient distance
one from another, became more or less interchangeable instruments in the
construction of knowledge" (80). In other words, seventeenth-century
paintings can be understood as models, tools for discovery; Calderon's
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use of terms taken from art, and the fact that the construction of art is conducive to the knowledge of basic scientific principles, points toward the
fact that the plays are designed to elucidate scientifically.'O
But to elucidate what? As previously noted, the "asunto" of the auto is
the Eucharist, and the plays demonstrate the real presence of Christ in the
Eucharist, "queriendo que lo invisible / en lo visible se muestre" (1614).
Dale Pratt rightly distinguishes between the sacraments as they are represented in the plays, and those that are truly transubstantiated: "The
'Eucharist' presented at the end of many (but not all) of the autos is an
icon of the Eucharist presented at the end of the Mass, but it is not iconically identical to the Eucharist" (44). This is, in fact, a necessity for the
dramatic revelation of real presence. The transubstantiated host, the corpus verum, obscures its nature by means of accidents—barring of course
the somewhat frequent miracles of bleeding and speaking hosts; it is only
the represented Eucharist, the "icon" of the true host that can reveal its
"true" nature non-miraculously. Therefore, the autos have a didactic
advantage over the Mass: they can represent what the Mass cannot disclose.
Pratt further explains that "as an icon of the real Eucharist, the
'Eucharist' of the auto is an allegorical character [...]" (45). However, if
audiences are expected to leam from the dramatic representation of the
sacraments, they must be analogues of the true species, in addition to their
allegorical manifestations. That is, they must allow for systematic extrapolation: the Eucharist in the play possesses a represented efficacy, therefore the real sacraments must also possess this power. Without such analogous reasoning, no didacticism is possible.'•
Scientific models function in largely the same way; by representing
phenomena that cannot otherwise be seen, they allow observers to draw
conclusions. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer note, the "power of
new scientific instruments" in the seventeenth century, such as "the
microscope and telescope as well as the air-pump, [resides] in their
capacity to enhance perception, and to constitute new perceptual objects"
(36). The technicians who manufacture baroque instruments and the scientists who use them proceed from the notion that the senses are limited
and in need of amplification (Shapin and Schaffer 36-37).
There are two ways in which the autos create the model atmosphere
under which a similar kind of analogizing can take place. The first is
scenographic and the second rhetorical.'2 With respect to the first case.
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Calderon suggests in his description of the carros for El Maestrazgo del
Toison, that the "demostracion" happens "en la apariencia" (Shergold and
Varey 137). Pratt remarks that "a drawing of a tree, a cardboard facsimile, a person dressed as a tree can all represent a tree, but iconic identity
occurs only when a real tree is somehow incorporated onto the stage"
(44). Such "iconic identity" does occasionally happen, as Calderon's
"memorias de las apariencias" show. For example, for El vidtico cordero
he instructs, "a de aver para la mano vn arbol natural con algunas ramas,"
but even in this case, the naturalness is secondary to the analogue suggested: "y buscarle el que mas parezca que hafe vna cruz" (Shergold and
Varey 192). In fact, Calderon shows very slight concem with "iconic
identity," as in this example: "En medio de este carro a de aver vn arbol
(no de recortado como el del otro autos), sino redondo, y la copa muy
poblada de ojas, o vien ymitadas o naturales, como mejor parezca" (162;
emphasis mine). The distinction between "naturalia" and "artificialia"
seems to mean little for Calderon and, as Anne Goldar observes, the difference is "precisely one that the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
delighted in undermining" (325). It is all "apariencia," and the didactic
efficacy lies not in the identity of representation and nature, but in the
accessibility to knowledge that the analogy between the "sagrada fabrica"
of the auto sacramental and the fabricated nature of the world provides. • 3
In this much the construction of an artificial environment that allows
for the apprehension of otherwise invisible phenomena are for the autos
and scientific instruments the same. However, in order to create a context
in which the plays' audiences can understand what they observe to be
"evidencias," Calderon must represent conditions under which the invisible can be seen. For Boyle, this involved the evacuation ofa chamber by
means of a pump.'"* As Davis Baird and Alfred Nordmann describe, the
"space under the bell jar is a stage for the performance of novelty and difference, hermetically sealed off against the world of spectators, yet perfectly transparent to them" (55). The construction ofa dramatic space for
the performance of difference in theological terms involves not only stage
effects that visually represent the body of Christ within the Eucharist, but
also the rhetorical evocation of a specific temporal context: the end of
time.
In El ano santo en Roma, Amor declares that "lo que fiie, y es, y ha de
ser" is "reducido a un argumento" (496). Kurtz notes that in this auto,
"time is indivisible, and all of its parts are homologous, conjoined and
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interrelated, not by chronology, but rather by analogically theophanic significance" (137). The idea that future, past, and present are collapsed in
one allegorical moment is even more clearly expressed in Los alimentos
del hombre, in which Padre states:
Que pues de horas, dias, semanas,
meses y afios han de hacerse
los siglos, para que conste
Ios raros prodigios de este,
a los futuros siglos seiis
testigos, de que en el breve
mapa vuestro reducir
intento a tiempo presente
el venidero [...]. (1611)
This is a common feature of the autos, to present all of human time, from
creation to judgment, within the space of a single play. The "[pjrodigios"
that Mundo asserts "veran los hombres / en tres actos" in El gran teatro
del mundo include human history from beginning to end (206). Kurtz
deals with the contemporary witness of events to come in terms of
"keiygma" (120-63), but it is important to note that the Augustinian
notion of time that Kurtz cites as the foundation for the autos^ achronicity includes both "the unicity of historical progress through time," and the
conferral of autoptic capability at the end of time (123).i5 Augustine deals
most clearly witli this in On the Trinity, in which he writes that sight is
the "highest reward to the just" (1, 13). However, this ability to see is not
only given to the just, but to the wicked, although in differing degrees:
And then He comes to the sight of His own glory, in which He
shall come to judgment; which sight will be common to the
ungodly and to the just. [...] For inasmuch as the Son of God
is equal to the Father, He does not receive this power of executing judgment, but He has it with the Father in secret; but He
receives it, so that the good and the bad may see Him judging,
inasmuch as He is the Son of man. Since the sight of the Son
of man will be shovm to the bad also: for the sight of the form
of God will not be shown except to the pure in heart, for they
shall see God; that is, to the godly only, to whose love He
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promises this very thing, that He will show Himself to them.
[...] But because the wicked are not able to see the Son of God
as He is in the form of God equal to the Father, but yet it is
necessary that both the just and the wicked should see the
Judge of the quick and dead, when they will be judged in His
presence [...]. (1.13)16
Paraphrasing Shapin and Schaffer, Augustine's conception of the apocalypse affords for the constitution of new perceptual objects. As we shall
see, by staging El nuevo palacio del Retiro at the moment of judgment,
Calderon grants his audiences proleptic vision.
The fallibility of human senses is dramatized in autos such as El cubo
de la Almudena in which Oido, Olfato, Tacto, Gusto, and Vista are characters. The audience, however, is in a position to see their failures without sharing them. In contrast, perception becomes a contest in El nuevo
palacio del Retiro; a prize, the transubstantiated "Forma," goes to the
character—again, one of the five senses—^who can rightly ascertain the
presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
El nuevo palacio del Retiro begins with a description of the world as a
work of art, a series of "obras" that gives shape to chaos; first the "supremo pincel" draws the world, formerly "una confusion, un caos" into order
with "rasgos de su omnipotencia / y lineas de su poder" (137, 138); the
"segunda obra" is taxonomic, and serves to "dividir las cosas" (138);
finally, the "Ley Escrita," like the earth itself, is drawn up:
de una piedra Dios redujo
sus Mandamientos a diez
Preceptos, siendo su dedo
de su lamina el cincel. (138)
Construction is a leitmotif in the auto, with special attention dedicated to
the "fabrica" of Philip IV's new Palacio del Retiro. But the palace is also
that which "vio Juan / en su Apocalipsi," and Madrid is also "la hermosa
y rica / triunfante Jerusalen" (139). Paterson explains:
En tomo al tropo nuevo palacio-ciudad celestial, se desarrolla
un conjunto de traslaciones: El Rey Felipe IV, su consorte la
Reina Isabel y el Conde Duque se convierten en Cristo, su
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Iglesia y la figura generica de Hombre respectivamente. De
manera semejante, se transforman a lo divino varias etapas de
Ia inauguraci6n y varios incidentes en su desarrollo para conceptuar la historia providencial, desde la Creaci6n hasta el Dia
del Juicio y la Nueva Jerusalen. Como se ve en este breve bosquejo, el sitio real y sus protagonistas estan presentes en cualquier momento de la acci6n. ("Madrid" 197)
He further notes that, "en el piano temporal del auto, el palacio del Retiro
es el presente donde e s t ^ involucrados el pasado desde la Creaci6n y el
futuro hasta el Dia del Juicio y la Ciudad Etema" (198).'''
With this foreshortening of divine history as the backdrop. El nuevo
palacio del Retiro, after a short introduction, proceeds to Philip's judgment of humankind and—^with Judaismo subsequently banished from the
holy city to be "[e]n atomos dividido"—the celebratory contest of the
senses begins for Gusto, Oido, Olfato, Tacto, and Vista (146). Because the
nature of the contest is to perceive rightly the true nature of the transubstantiated Host, the new perceptual object constituted by the auto is the
Eucharist itself The scene first involves a visual substitution: the king
appears first with the transubstantiated "Forma," and then alone, to show
that the Eucharist consists solely of his body. Rey explains:
Esta blanca Forma, este
circulo breve y pequeno,
capaz esfera es de cuanto
contiene hoy la tierra y cielo.
Blanco pan flie; pero ya,
transubstanciado en si mesmo
no es Pan, sus especies, si
porque este solo es mi Cuerpo. (150)
The stage directions explain how the visual substitution takes place:
"Desparecese la Forma y queda el Rey en su lugar" (150).
Vista is initially able to make sense of the substitution, while the other
senses are not. It is ultimately Oido, however, who learns only through
hearing, that comprehends the mystery. By casting this moment both in
the present day—in Madrid and in the time of Philip IV—and in the
future—in the New Jerusalem, where sight is awarded to the faithful—
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Calderon is able to represent the correction of the senses. That is. Vista is
finally able to see, paradoxically stating, "Yo no veo lo que veo" (151).
The audience is granted the same perspective.
The substitution of man for sacrament in El nuevo palacio del Retiro
is somewhat cruder than the elegant host oiEl Maestrazgo del Toison that
opens to reveal a child within. But the anachronic element, the rhetorical
casting of the play both in the present and future in order to invoke the
vision apocalyptically granted, is the same. Like all instruments designed
to enhance perception, scientific and otherwise, the autos impose "both a
correction and a discipline upon the senses" (Shapin and Schaffer 37). As
Shapin and Schaflfer show, "the discipline enforced by devices such as the
microscope and the air-pump [is] analogous to the discipline imposed
upon the senses by reason" (37). While the text of the autos urges such a
correction and a discipline through reason, the performance of the plays
imposes this same correction (discovery) and discipline (demonstration)
sensorially.
The idea that the autos show the end of the world is not new; art has
been doing so since the earliest Christian times. The plays' innovation is
to suggest that audiences see this now, that Madrid is the New Jerusalem,
that we are living in the world in which the sight of these things is possible. This explains the radical technology of the autos: not that the kingdom is near, but that the kingdom is here. In this sense, the autos do not
offer a new spectacle, but promise a new perspective. Thus there is not
only representation of the apocalypse, but the appropriation of apocalyptic perspective which promises direct apprehension and subsequently
comprehension as a matter of fact, not an article of faith. This is why so
many autos end not with a declaration of belief, but with an affirmation
of what has been witnessed.
What is not generally considered is that this perception of the invisible
might lead to "perfect" knowledge, that is, science. A number of autos
argue a posteriori, such as El cubo de la Almudena, in which audiences
see the miraculously sustaining effects of the Eucharist. But El nuevo
palacio del Retiro does more than this; it argues causality by representing
it visually at the end of time. It is to be supposed that communicants have
all experienced the effects of the Eucharist, at least the effects that might
be deemed ordinary rather than miraculous. But it is also to be supposed
that the faithful have no certain knowledge of the cause; this must be
taken on faith. An auto does not reveal the actual causes—it is not a kind
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of miraculous Mass in which the nature of the sacrifice itself becomes
patent—rather it represents the cause for the purposes of extrapolation.
The child is present in the icon of the Eucharist in the same way that the
body of Christ is present in the transubstantiated Host. An auto like El
nuevo palacio del Retiro shows the conditions under which the cause will
become apparent, again, for the purposes of proleptic analogy.
It might be objected that scientific instruments do not represent in the
same way that drama does, and that the autos more properly present a
simulacrum where science utilizes models designed to reproduce isolated
conditions also found in nature. However, this cavil would not accurately reflect the tenor of baroque science. As I discussed above, artistic representations are in fact considered instruments of knowing during the seventeenth century. 18 Furthermore, Shapin and Schaflfer show that it was the
verisimilar representation of Boyle's experiments in texts—"thought
experiments" (55), or "virtual witnessing" (60)—not direct witness itself
that led to the propagation of Boyle's theories: "visual representations,
few as they necessarily were in Boyle's texts, were mimetic devices. By
virtue of the density of circumstantial detail that could be conveyed
through the engraver's laying of lines, they imitated reality and gave the
viewer a vivid impression of the experimental scene" (62). Calder6n does
not demonstrate real presence experimentally and obviate faith. Rather,
he employs rhetorical and scenographic contrivances strikingly similar to
those of contemporaneous scientists, and relies on the same epistemological conventions used for the production of matters of fact.'^
Another objection might be that the auto deals with what is in fact not
observable, while Boyle's science deals with the observed. However,
Maurice Mandelbaum notes that Boyle is not only interested in the
enhancement of the senses, but the "extension of sense knowledge by
analogy" (107) and the "translation of explanatory principles from the
observed to the unobserved" (110-11). In other words, the objects of the
new experimental science are not only observed, but also imperceptible.
This process of analogy, called "transdiction" by Mandelbaum, allows
baroque investigators to make statements that are "meaningful and true
about what [lies] beyond the boundaries of possible experiences" (61). In
this way, the scientific instrument and the represented concept of the auto
serve as tools to reach an analogical understanding of "objects or events
which not only have not yet been observed, but which cannot in principle
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be observed" (63).
Pratt's careful analysis of "play" in the autos might offer the most serious objection to understanding the plays in light of modeling practices.
He argues the dramas create a surplus of meaning and inevitably undercut, if only partly, their own lessons. Pratt shows convincingly that "the
auto inevitably encompasses more than a didactic message; within the
work itself exists a dialectic between didacticism and the supplementary
artifice which makes the teaching moment possible" (38). This is also,
however, a fundamental characteristic of the laboratory appurtenance.
Baird and Nordmann point out that the bell jar, too, creates an "excess of
scientific meaning": "while the language and methodology of science can
circumscribe particular dimensions of meaning, the controlled fate of the
bird also instills a sense of scientific wonder, mastery of nature, technological accomplishment, and morbid fascination" (60).
The audience oiEl nuevo palacio del Retiro and the witnesses gathered
to certify Boyle's experiments are in a very different environment than
the one they observe, but the suggestion that one can extrapolate from this
model environment is an essential characteristic of both. The didactic
utility of each hinges upon the belief that what is seen, although impossible outside the limits of the model environment, has implications for the
world that the spectator inhabits. Relying on any audience to validate a
demonstration has two dangers; first, that consensus depends on the
rhetorical skill of the playwright or scientist to produce a persuasive discursive framework; and second, that the demonstration will be treated as
nothing more than rhetoric, that the conclusions suggested will not have
the appearance of fact. lUietoric is frequently used to produce a simulacrum of demonstration.20 Boyle runs this risk as much as Calderon
does; Shapin and Schaffer note that Boyle's technology works "to achieve
the appearance of matters of fact as given items. That is to say, each technology functioned as an objectifying resource" (77).
The plays work similarly. Even if the propriety of the autos was ultimately challenged in the eighteenth century (Parker 24), and though modem readers, like Pratt, have found polysemy in the plays' allegory, it is
unlikely that the audiences that first witnessed the representations found
anything theological with which to quibble. Virtue and constancy are
rewarded, heterodoxy punished; these outcomes would be considered
apodictic by Calderon's contemporaries. We may dislike endings in
which Judaismo is savagely damned, but we cannot dispute the surety
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493
with which such endings were anticipated. This is a simple, but fundamental characteristic of the autos; their content is treated as a matter of
fact, even when the subject of the plays is related to Lutheran contention,
as in El gran mercado del mundo.
Though factual in appearance, the nature of the dramatic demonstration is not that of the Mass, as noted earlier. One might argue that the
beginnings of what Shapin and Schaffer call the "experimental life" lie in
this ability to extrapolate out of difference; allegory is suitable to this
style of thinking because it draws attention to the difference between
itself and the allegorized object. Both the dramatic and scientific models,
to paraphrase de Man, designate primarily a distance in relation to their
own origin, and, they establish tiieir language in a void, or in Boyle's
case, a vacuum.
As we have seen, the dramatic representation of the autos and scientific demonstration intersect in their emphasis on construction and instrumentality, in the act of discovery, and in the processes of demonstration.
The spectacle of Calder6n's sacramental plays can therefore be understood as an opportunity for autopsy, for seeing oneself in order to believe.
It is not the case that Calder6n is a scientist, or that he anticipates innovations in scientific methodology; natural philosophers had been building
to know, seeing to know, and agreeing on tfie experiences that would constitute true knowledge since before Calder6n's birth. But by understanding the dramatic spectacle of the autos in light of other empirical experiences contemporaneously harnessed to produce facts, we can understand
Calder6n's sacramental drama as a didactic technology for the establishment of matters of fact, rather than of faith. In essence, these are not mystery plays, but their very opposite; by attempting to render the imperceptible sensible through methodologies analogous to those used by contemporaneous natural philosophers Calder6n transforms allegory into a theater of perception.
NOTES
1. Castro verde echoes Calder6n's description of the autos in the /oa to La segunda esposa y triunfar muriendo:
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BCom, Vol 58, No. 2 (2006)
puestos en verso, en idea
representable, cuestiones
de la Sacra Teologfa. (427)
2. A theater is, of course, also a book. As William N. West points out, before the fifteenth century,
a "theater" is an "idea built around a word," a text composed of an extended metaphor that purports
to "represent the manifold of the world [...] with completeness, perfect symmetry, and self-containment" (2, 1). Calder6n owns Laurentius Beyerlinck's Magnum theatrum vitae humanae (1631), the
sequel to Theodor Zwinger's Theatrum Vitae Humanae of 1565 (P6rez Pastor 387). Very little systematic work has been done on the possible relationship between Calder6n's interest in the encyclopedic tradition of theatra and his drama Alan K. G Paterson's "The Great World of don Pedro
Calderdn's Theatre and the Beyerlinck Connection" represents an important first step.
3. Jan Golinski underscores Francis Bacon's reservations about the theatricality of science and
explains that Boyle, too, "recognized the dangers inherent in dramatic experimental demonstrations
[...]" (Making 92). Golinski explains that the "mischief would arise if philosophers succumbed to the
temptation simply to bedazzle their audiences, without truly enlightening them; or if audiences could
not tell the difference between the performances of a philosopher and those of a conjurer" ("Noble"
27). On the relationship of science to the theater in general, see Golinski's Making Natural
Knowledge, 91-94. Pamela H. Smith shows that "the tempering control of ratio" as insulation from
the "harm that can result from immersion in sensory and sensual experience" was a recurrent theme
in both art and science (435-36).
4. This comparison of experimentation to dramatic or artistic representation is not unique in
Harvey's writings. As Crombie notes, "Harvey was well aware of the analogy between the rational
artist who formed in his mind a conception of what he would represent in his painting and how he
would do so, and the rational experimental scientist who proceeded likewise by an antecedent theoretical and quantitative analysis of his subject matter" ("Experimental" 111-12). On Harvey's influence in Spain, see Jos6 Maria L6pez Piflero's "Harvey's Doctrine of the Circulation of the Blood in
Seventeenth-Century Spain."
5. This argument is not intended as a contribution to the contentious debate over the failures and
successes of Spanish science known as the polemica de la ciencia espanola. The mutual nature of the
influence between scientific and artistic forms of representation allows us to set aside questions of
priority; the fact that Calderdn precedes Boyle is not meant to imply influence, but rather a general
epistemological climate. Both Calderbn and Boyle face basic episteniological questions: how can a
given phenomenon, heretofore unobserved and unavailable to human understanding, be perceived?
On the polimica, see L6pez Piflero's Ciencia y ticnica (15-37), and Jorge Cafiizares Esguerra's
"Renaissance Iberian Science."
6. The title of Aurora Egido's La fdbrica de un auto sacramental points to the first of these uses,
while Francisco Alumbo de FerTara's Fdbrica del Mundo, cited by Covarrubias in his definition of
"fibrica," illustrates its use to refer to the world; Andreas Vesalius describes the body in the same
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495
terms in his famously titled his anatomical masterpiece De humani corporis fabrica (1543).
7. Take for example the urging of the Villa de Madrid to treat the failings of the theater as one would
a diseased body: "pues como no se debe quitar la vida al cuerpo porque est6 enfermo, sino curarle;
tampoco parece que si algi:m exceso hay en las comedias, se repare con quitarlas, sino con quitarle"
(421). Joan M. Corominas, for his part, describes the action of the autos as fundamentally corporeal,
observing, "En todo momento el auto sacramental es la escenficaci6n de conflictos, no entre seres
humanos, sino entre los elementos humanos dentro de una misma persona" (65). Of the theater as
world, one could site innumerable examples undoubtedly familiar to readers.
8. A. A. Parker explains that "the autos remain distinct from the generally accepted standards of
drama" in two ways: "firstly they deal with another plane of existence, they are conceptual and not
realistic; and secondly they are lacking in verisimilitude [...] in the wider sense of possibility or probability; the action performed on their stage, despite the narrative element in the allegory, is not an
approximation to one that is in any way possible offstage" (82). It is important to note, however, that
the use of the theater as a model that might illustrate the ultimate consequences of human action within the drama of Christian salvation, and the use of scientific instruments for the purposes of quantification and more accurate simulation both had to overcome Aristotelian prohibitions. As Crombie
notes, Aristotle's "formulation of all relations as attributes predicated of subjects was not suitable for
expressing functional dependence, nor as a structural formulation lacking the dimension of time
could it express rates of change. His strict definition of categories excluding any relation between
quality, quantity, position, place, time and so on opposed quantification at its most essential points"
{Styles 410). The kind of reasoning by analogy that allovved Calderdn and scientists torepresentphenomena otherwise unavailable to human sight for the purposes of illumination implies a necessary
rupture with classical models.
9. This may seem an unlikely comparison, but critics often remark upon the instrumentality of
Golden Age theater. Javier Aparicio Maydeu, for example, characterizes the "comedia hagiogr^ica
barroca" as a "miquina de Ia Contrarreforma" (15).
10. Floral still-life paintings, the point at which the baroque fascination with art as a study in perspective perhaps most clearly meets the capability of painting to serve as documentary record of natural life was a great interest of Calderbn's (Madrid 250). Josd Maria Diez Borque notes Calderdn's
importance as a collector of art, and his occasional collaboration with important painters, describing
him as "el escritor barroco [...] de la articulacidn pintura-poesia" (36). In her work on the paintings
owned by the scientist Sylvius, Pamela H. Smith shows that a great deal of a collector's scientific
understanding can be reconstructed by examining his taste. Such a study on Calderdn's interest in
painting would be a valuable addition to our understanding of the playwright's knowledge. On the
intersections between Spanish still-life painting and science, see Marfa Jos6 L6pez Terrada's
Tradicidn y cambio en la pintura valenciana de flores (1600-1850) (13-109).
11. Pratt's allegorical interpretation of the Eucharist in the autos responds to Kurtz's understanding
of the plays as essentially liturgical in function; that is, when discussing the relationship of the rep-
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resented Eucharist to the transubstantiated Eucharist, Kurtz suggests identity where Pratt stresses
analogy (although this characterization oversimplifies their penetrating analyses). Similarly, there are
tvk-o model systems that reflect these camps: the scale model that reproduces exactly and the analogue
model in which the "form of the origin pertains to the subject matter of one field of investigation,
whereas that of the application pertains to the subject matter of another" (Wallace 306). My own
interpretation differs from that of Kurtz and Pratt; I believe that although the relationship between the
two Eucharists is analogous and not identical, knowledge is produced largely in the same way as scientific knowledge, and that its subsequent valorization by the audience legitimizes this knowledge as
a matter of fact. On identity and analogy in science, see Agnes Arber's "Analogy in the History of
Science."
12. We might include a third: dramatic. In the loa Lafdbrica del navio, the assembly of a ship proves
to be the instrument of salvation. The qualities necessary to the faithful are allegorically brought
together for the purposes of constructing a ship which proves to be the means by which grace is
attained. Thus construction serves as the central metaphor for the achievement of grace.
13. Marfa Alicia Amadei-Pulice notes that the "lugar escdnico barroco esficlicio y aparencial, pero
veridico a los ojos. El engafio de la vista que crea la visi6n prosp6ctica, duplicando los lugares del
mundo real, hace posible la sustituci6n necesaria, la representaci6n de uno por otro, que le dari al
teatro barroco su base epistemol6gica como el teatro representativo del 'gran teatro del mundo.' Y es
precisamente el uso extenso de esta palabra apariencia la que denota el fondo ilusionista de esta escena y que se debe a una relacibn especial que se crea entre el ojo del espectador y la escena" (113-14).
14. Boyle's bell jar is an instrument designed to show how different inanimate and animate objects—
most importantly Torricelli's barometer (i.e., the vacuum-in-vacuo experiment) but also polished
blocks, and small animals—react to a vacuum.
15. Kurtz extends and considerably enriches Parker's notion that the "conceptual nature of the auios
[...] enabled Calder6n to embrace all times and places in one dramatic action, but it is their asunto
itself that compelled him to do so. The Eucharist, the 'symbolum unitatis,' gathers into its own timeless unity the whole of mankind's spiritual history and destiny" (76).
16. In El nuevo palacio del Retiro, Hombre recalls Augustine's passage:
[...] ver^ el arco
de paz, la cruz donde triunfe
el Rey, colocado en medio
del Trono, donde se juzguen
vivos y muertos [...]. (145)
The play's following scene (145-46) dramatizes the judgment of Apostasia, Gentilidad, Occidente,
Africa, and Judaismo.
17. Calderdn's characterization of Madrid as the center of the Christian world in El nuevo palacio del
Retiro is echoed in the poems celebrating the inauguration of the palace collected by Diego
Covarruvias i Leyva in 1635. In P6rez de Montalvan's decima, for example, the new structure is
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497
described as the epitome of the world: "Ni es Iardin, ni es Sol, ni es Cielo, / Ni es lo mas, porque lo
es todo." The topoi that Calder6n relies on in the auto—the world and palace as theater, the world
and palace asfdbricas, the palace as a symbolic reconstruction of Solomon's temple, and so on—
recur throughout the anthology. Particularly interesting is \6\ez de Guevara's sonnet, in which the
Palace is a concretized idea; the "Idea casi divina" becomes "f&brica animada." Guillen del Castillo
employs a similar image in his "En alabanza del Palacio"; the palace is a marble realization of the
"Idea / De artifice ingenioso." Calder6n's notion that the play is a hypothetical model that embodies
an idea and that Madrid functions as both universal and particular, seem to be commonplaces in the
literature dedicated to the inauguration.
18. Jean Pequent illustrates the perceived similarity between literary and scientific enterprises in his
Experimenta nova anatomica (1651) by referring to "Authors, not of Books, which as yet I have not
so much as heard to be extant; but of [... ] Experiments" (cited in Boas Hall 189).
19. On the synonymous nature of science and epistemology in the seventeenth century, see Shapin
and Schafifer (25), and Mandelbaum (62-65).
20. Crombie and A. Carugo explain that the "strength of rhetoric consists in the ability of an eloquent
public speaker to persuade his listeners by means of arguments that have only the appearance of
demonstration" (240).
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