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Incorruptible

By Michael Hollinger

Directed by Drucie McDaniel

Incorruptible offers believers and nonbelievers alike a prominent voice for a balanced yet biting commentary on faith and the questionable morality of the religious institutions that cash in on it.

Like its unambiguously ironic title, the play leaves little in the way of metaphorical mystery. Set around 1250 A.D. in Priseaux, France, the story follows a group of struggling monks who have resorted to selling the bones of their local deceased on their newly established black market of Catholic Saints. Shipping them off to distant monasteries, the austere religious leaders pass off the extremities as divine relics with the capacity to work miracles on any passing visitor with a penny and a prayer. Their customers build their religious audiences, the monks replenish their funds for the poor, and everyone goes home happy. After all, moral integrity can do little to fill a poor man’s pocket or a starving man’s stomach. As the most prudent of all the monks, Brother Martin, convincingly argues: “If we can’t do good with our faith alone, then faith alone’s no good.” With this axiom, Hollinger spins the web that the riotous antics to come attempt to untangle — or perhaps tangle even further as the corruption that the most spiritually cynical among us tend to associate with religious institutions proves, in the end, to serve a Godly purpose.

“A hysterically funny dark comedy about the dark ages.“

WHO’S WHO IN THE CAST

A Note About Relics

Originally posted to the Arden Theatre Company blog in 2014.

Though the black market in relics depicted in Incorruptible was perhaps exaggerated in scale to serve the story,  playwright Michael Hollinger drew upon inspiration from the historical records. Relics, the physical remains of a holy person, were prized in the Middle Ages for their ability to grant miracles. Some relics were passed down through generations, while others changed hands many times. With the demand for relics came opportunists capable of supplying a relic even when none were to be had.

In an age characterized by war, disease, and draught, one of the few certainties of the Middle Ages was the power relics had to ward off destruction. Caught a mystery illness? Pray to the relic for relief. Late frost endangering the crops? Pray to the relic for a better harvest. A relic was defined by the miracles it created. Even a fake relic could become a real one if it achieved a miracle.

The need for relics was not solely spiritual. Pilgrims would travel great distances to visit a holy relic. A type of tourism, with the influx of pilgrims into a community, would come to an influx of money. The presence of a miracle-granting relic could prop up the economy of an abbey or a village.

Rarely was a relic sold or given away. So if one needed a relic, there were two options—buy or steal. Given the finite number of saints and body parts, and the large population in need of miracles, medieval opportunists were quick to see profit potential. So high was the demand for relics and so rampant were counterfeits in the Middle Ages, that the leadership of the Catholic Church started to issue authentication tags for saints. However, the tags were, as it turned out, very easy to forge. A church in Geneva proudly displayed the brain of St. Peter, until one day, the brain was moved and was discovered to be a pumice stone. Since forensic science was somewhat lacking in the Middle Ages, if the relic was a real bone, authentication became trickier. The only real way to identify a fake was if someone else claimed to have the same relic, which happened fairly often. The question over which of St. Foy’s remains are the real ones in Incorruptible would not have been unusual. In his classic treatise on the dangers of revering relics, John Calvin, the Protestant reformer, claimed that if all the relics spread out over Europe and beyond were brought together, “it would be made manifest that every Apostle has more than four bodies, and every Saint two or three.” The only way to know a “real” relic was by determining whether it had performed any miracles.

Stealing relics was a frequent recourse for those wary of buying fakes. While Hollinger’s rendering of the theft is fictionalized, St. Foy, the saint in Incorruptible, was part of a high-profile Dark Ages crime. St. Foy was housed at the monastery of Agen. Lacking any relics of their own, the Abbey of Conques sent one of its monks to infiltrate Agen. According to one legend, the monk ingratiated himself at Agen for over ten years before finally making his move and absconding with the saint back to Conques. Conques quickly began to prosper, attracting enough pilgrims that soon required a larger church. The monks quickly point to this sudden windfall as a miracle, proving St. Foy was happy in her new home.

Funding has been made possible in part by the Camden County Cultural & Heritage Commission at Camden County College through the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.