directed, and in which he played the role of one of the Magi. The
authorities of the camp obviously thought such a production – properly
censored – would boost prisoners’ morale. Indeed, the play saw three
performances, December 24 , 25 , and 26 , to an estimated crowd of 2 , 000
each time.^24 Several of his fellow prisoners who were priests encouraged
the project and one took the title role of Bariona, the chief of a poor
village near Bethlehem in revolt against its Roman occupiers. The
Germans saw the villainous Romans as the British Empire abusing
its colonists whereas the prisoners properly interpreted the story as
applying to their Nazi captors. A similar ambiguity will grace his next
play,The Flies, again passing censorship in occupied Paris less than three
years later.
The play melds Christian themes with proto-existentialist values.
One is touched by the delicacy with which Sartre handles the former
while insisting on the latter. And one is struck by his use of the term
“lightness” to depict Bariona’s state after his “conversion” to defend the
escape of the Christ child from Herod’s murderous soldiers, for that
term reappears three years later inThe Fliesdescribing Orestes’ emo-
tional rebirth after having avenged his father’s murder by killing his
mother and his stepfather. Of course, the Nietzschean contrast with the
“spirit of gravity” in both cases should not be overlooked.^25
The ambiguous conversion of the skeptical Bariona entails turning
from despair to hope and a kind of existential “freedom.” In his exhort-
ation to the wavering hero, themagusBalthasar (Sartre’s role) assures him:
Then you will discover that truth which Christ came to teach you and which you
already know: you are not your suffering...It is you who give it its meaning and
make it what it is. For in itself it’s nothing but matter for human action, and Christ
came to teach you that you are responsible for yourself and your suffering. It is like
(^24) SeeOR 1562. In an interview with Beauvoir late in life, Sartre recalls: “That’s what gave me
25 the taste for theater” and Beauvoir adds: “the ́aˆtre engage ́”(Ce ́r^237 ).
See Nietzsche’s reference to “The spirit of Gravity,”Thus Spoke Zarathustra Part III, where
it is associated with the burden of Judeo-Christian ethics from which Zarathustra would
unburden us by his teaching of “a wholesome and healthy” self-love in contrast with the life-
denying commandments of established religion. We have already noted Nietzsche’s presence
in Sartre’s early novelUne De ́faite( 1927 ) andThe Legend of Truth( 1930 ). One of the major
losses in Sartre’s bibliography is the book-length manuscript on Nietzsche allegedly written
as part of his reflections on ethics about the same time as he composed hisCM( 1947 – 1948 );
see Louette,Sartre contra Nietzsche, 14 n. 3.
Bariona, or The Son of Thunder 173