Tenebrae

Tenebrae means darkness. It is the name of a service held on Holy Thursday and Good Friday. They still did it pretty much everywhere when I was a kid. Nowadays you really have to look to find a good Tenabrae service.

Anyway, all the candles in the church are extinguished during Tenebrae and, when the church is completely dark, the priests on the altar shuffle their feet on the ground and shake their missals to make us think of the chaos of a world without God. For Catholics, a world without God could only be a world where everything is governed by fluke. And even if it might seem like there are reasons to be moral in such a world it could only be a fluke, a momentary contingency, that there would be a moral aspect of life. Ultimately, it wouldn't make any difference whether life was fair or unfair.

In the beginning was the Word! The word = Logos, that is to say the fact that our life makes sense depends on Jesus existing. And Catholics like me believe that it makes no difference one way or another whether you believe in him on this point: no Jesus, no sense. During Tenebrae we imagine a world in which the word did not come. At the end of the Holy Thursday mass there is no conclusion. People just walk away. The mass is not completed until Easter. It's all one mass with this giant ellipsis in the middle. You might say that from the moment we leave the Holy Thursday until Easter Sunday is a gap in which Richard Dawkins gets to be right.

Anyway, Cordelia mentions a chant from Tenebrae, Quomodo sedet sola civitas. This is interesting for all sorts of reasons. One is that this is one of very few instances, if not the only one, in which music comes off well in Waugh. I have often wondered if Waugh wasn't tone deaf. He refused an invitation from Stravinsky by saying that music meant nothing to him.

It's also relevant because the words give extra depth of what Brideshead Deserted means. (I've cited from Tanakh Translation here.)

Alas!
Lonely sits the city
Once great with people!
She that was great among nations
Is become like a widow;
The princes among states
Is become a thrall.
Bitterly she weeps in the night,
Her cheek wet with tears.
There is none there to comfort her
Of all her friends.
All her allies have betrayed her;
They have become like foes.
Judah has gone into exile
Because of misery and harsh oppression;
When she settled among the nations,
she found no rest;
All her pursuers overtook her

in the narrow places.

This is sung with an antiphon:

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn back to the Lord your God.

That "Jerusalem, Jerusalem" can acquire incredible weight when chanted.

The basic text here comes from Lamentations, and the lamenting is actually just warming up here. It keeps getting worse for Jerusalem after this. But we don't have to read it because Anthony Blanche gives us a summary version when talking about Theresa Marchmain's illness:

The Marchioness has been a positive pest ever since I came to London, trying to make me get in touch with them. What a time that poor woman is having! It only shows there's some justice in life.

Okay here is the stunning part: it is very much a, if not the, key message of the Bible that the horrible fate that befalls Jerusalem is entirely deserved. That this suffering is form of love to bring us back to God. In other words, Anthony is right: what happens to Theresa Marchmain here does show us that there is some justice in life. And the question we are left with is whether we want to believe in the punishment only or whether we also want to believe in the possibility of redemption.

The suffering is the easy part. Just step out the door. Even the Buddha could see that part. But an actual, positive redemption—as opposed to the denial of our individuality, like the Buddha proposes—that is harder to believe in.

And, hey, you don't have to if you don't want to.

Anyway, I'm sure you want to hear the chant in question. Here it is:




The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.