Parisian in Baltimore

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the confirmation of the Constitution of the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola. To commemorate the event, Baltimore's Loyola College last week presented--for the first time in English--a play written by a Jesuit and first produced 331 years ago. The Cenodoxus of Jacob Bidermann, once a great hit, gradually dropped out of sight. But in recent years it has been brilliantly revived in Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, Munich.

Cenodoxus, Master of Paris is an unabashed morality play revealing the struggle between good & evil in the soul of a wealthy and learned Parisian. Cenodoxus ("Vainglory") is known for his piety, charity, virtue; actually he is a fraud, a creature of damnable pride whose virtue is all for effect. Prodded by the black figures of Egoism and Hypocrisy and preyed on by demons, he resists (even on his death bed) the pleadings of his guardian angel; and at his death is tried in Heaven and condemned to Hell.

The play has many picturesque moments, one towering one: the trial scene, with Christ, surrounded by saints and angels, in the Judgment Seat. At high moments, Cenodoxus is capable of a stern eloquence; at low ones, of a quaint humor. But except as a spectacle, the play limps, largely because Playwright Bidermann burdened his hero with the sin of Pride, "as the most decent for portrayal on the stage." It is also the most deadening; about all a playwright can do is lambaste it. Had Cenodoxus--who was, after all, a Parisian--gone in for a few of the more scarlet sins, he might have become, like Faust and Don Juan, a really immortal sinner.

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