faith & Ionesco
Ionesco stated in 1966:
"Even I cannot say whether I am Christian or not, religious or not, a believer or not, a mystic or not; I can only say that my upbringing was Christian…We all hunger, we all thirst. (from Eugene Ionesco by Simone Bemussa). "
As a cast and crew we found Ionesco to be very conflicted in his faith. In an interview with Father Lendger about the failures of the contemporary church he sated that the "church had faded away into history. She fears being outside history. This is aberrant. Her role is to be outside of history, to be a bridge between history and the beyond of history." Father Lendger asked if Ionesco felt it was possible in his theatrical work to condemn the current church but offer a new form. Ionesco's response was that The Chairs questions that very idea. The Chairs shows the audience two people desperate for meaning in their life and acceptance by what they believe is a higher power.
Ionesco felt that the church had allowed ideas of God and faith to be reduced to everyday terms. For example, he stated justice was not discussed in terms of heavenly justice but in terms of earthly justice. In this play, he shows two characters who seem lost and have no faith to ground their thoughts and deeds. As Ionesco said, this is a play about "absence" and he specifically stated it was about the absence of God. Critic Edith Whitehurst Williams finds a correlation with Mercea Eliade's idea of the mythic quest and The Chairs, quoting Eliade "These myths of 'search for a transcendant land' explain something in addition to initiation dramas; they show the paradox of getting beyond opposition [in this case material things represented by the chairs], which is a necessary part of any world…the actual act by which the mind gets beyond a conditional, piecemeal universe, swinging between opposites, to return to the fundamental oneness that existed before creation." Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd stated that absurdist theatre calls into question the importance of man in the universe. Ultimately, Ionesco wrote, "we can no longer avoid asking ourselves what we are doing here on earth, and how, having no deep sense of our destiny, we can endure the crushing weight of the material world. That is the eternal problem if there ever was one." While he remained a member of the Orthodox Christian church throughout his life, he clearly questioned his faith and it does not seem he ever found a clear answer. Ionesco's epitaph on his grave reads "To pray to I-don't-know-who / I hope: Jesus Christ."
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