Good Friday Thoughts: It Is Finished
Some art, whether good or bad, to contemplate
“It is finished.” — John 19:30
The full verse (from the King James Version) is:
“When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.”
On this day, as Catholics, we have no Mass. We have a service, and the altars are stripped, and the tabernacle is empty, and the candles are doused, and the lights are all extinguished. It all is dark and silent… until Saturday evening at the Easter vigil Mass.
But until then. Silence.
Bach: St. Matthew Passion
I like sharing this since I’ve found this version of the St. Matthew Passion:
If you go to YouTube and watch it there, you can turn on the English captions, which are pretty good.
The Netherlands Bach Society has a huge library of high-quality Bach productions, and however they swung it with YouTube, there are no ad interruptions in the middle of the music (the St. Matthew Passion is 2 hours and 45 minutes long).
I know that the full Passion is a bit much for most people, and many of us simply sing one of the settings of what is called the Passion Chorale. Here is one such acapella settings, by one of my favorite groups, The Gesualdo Six:
The Gesualdo Six perform acapella Renaissance, religious, and other music. Check out their YouTube channel.
A Descent Into Hell
One of the aspects of the Triduum (the three days) is that after death Christ descended into hell to release (some of the) souls there. This is the Harrowing of Hell.
So now I’m about to do a big shift — while yes, I’m a big fan of Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially the Purgatorio, I’m also a fan of Jerry Pournelle & Larry Niven’s take on Dante, Inferno:
In college, I took a Science Fiction literature class, and this was my final paper:
Building a Modern Hell
Mary Pat Campbell
10 December 1995
Your assignment: Design Hell. Who would you put in your Hell? What would you do to them once they were in there? Would you just throw all the sinners in, lock the door, and turn up the heat? What would be the purpose of your Hell?
This is quite an assignment -- one that any theology student, new religion, or author might take up as a challenge. Dante Alighieri, tackling this assignment with the fervor of an ardent Catholic Classicist and a bitter political exile, created a highly regimented Hell. He developed a hierarchy of sins in the tradition of Greek natural philosophy and provided examples for each sin in well-known figures in 14th century Italy as well as legendary Greeks and Romans. For good measure and personal satisfaction, he threw in his numerous political enemies as well. Even though he showed some personal bias, his work was rather thorough; I'll give him an A+ for his excellent project.
Of course, there is the time-honored tradition of taking someone else's work and adding on to it. Designing a world is a tiring job, and it is difficult to think through every detail. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle basically do this in Inferno, in which they send a science-fiction writer to Dante's Hell (after sending him to a ridiculous death) and see how he deals with it. However, this is not simple plagiarism of an idea: as Raymond Wilson notes, Inferno "is almost entirely derivative and yet remarkably original". This is more than a simple book "in which the authors introduce all their favourite characters from history, with a loose thread of plot." [Shippey] Niven and Pournelle not only provide new examples for the old categories of sins but also so change the entire atmosphere of Hell.
That’s just the open. You can go to my old website to read the whole thing if you like.
While I do like Niven & Pournelle’s modern (for the 1970s) take on Inferno, it’s not really hell, and if I were to do an update, it would be different. They kind of turned hell into the ante-chamber of Purgatory, actually.
(And I have a Purgatorio update in mind…)
Niven liked my paper, and corrected me on one of my statements, which I put in a footnote:
2. As Benito says, "Now you know." I just want to point out that Pournelle "is a believing Roman Catholic. He himself says that he's a liberal. A 14th century liberal." [Spinrad] Updated Info: Larry Niven tells me that Jerry Pournelle is actually a member of the Church of England. Perhaps this looked the same as Catholic from Spinrad's distance.
Both Anglicans & Catholics do not want to be confused for the other. So thanks for the correction!
Later, Niven had somebody put my paper (with my permission) on his website, but the formatting has gotten all screwed up (with a CSS change, no doubt.)
Always trust the hand-rolled HTML of meep (from 2002, which is when I last updated it.)
All is silent
As I write this, I am preparing to attend my church’s Good Friday service.
This morning, I went to our Tenebrae for Good Friday (and did so for Maundy Thursday as well). I will likely go tomorrow for Holy Saturday. It’s a beautiful service with the congregation participating in the chant. I love that we get to do this.
So let me give you some art from the Met Collection as I listen to Bach…
