Drama as we know it bears only vestigial resemblances to sacred rite. There are forms of performance, however, in which the demarcation is not yet so complete. As the tropes which became the nucleus of medieval religious drama evolved within the Mass, for instance, they remained sacramental. Enacted not by actors but by priests, a trope such as the Quem quaeritis only incidentally depicted the discovery of the Resurrection. Rather it reaccomplished that discovery anew, just as the Church year as a whole reenacts the life and sacrifice of Christ.
For worshippers taught to believe earthly life the flicker of a dream, and the reality of the spirit absolute, impersonation must have been an ambiguous concept. In the theological notion of figura divinity could reveal itself in avatars estranged in time and space, yet one in God. As figura Abraham and Moses at once could be historical personages and transcendently the Lord himself.1
Performed, nearly all the extant tropes become a revelation, an experience of wonder. To the demoralized wayfarers in the Peregrini the Lord disguises himself as a priest, breaks bread before them (as in the Eucharist to come in the Mass), and disappears. Whereupon the wayfarers intone: "Heu! miseri! ubi erat sensus noster quando intellectus abierat?2 The amazed question ("where were our senses when we did not comprehend?") leads not to an awareness of role-playing or impersonation, but to the recognition of the insubstantiality of human wits and the shapes of this world in the sight of God. Sung or chanted, the question has the force of an incantation. It celebrates the incapacity of the rational self, and encourages mystification.