THE PASSION
The three main branches of Christendom, Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant, differ widely in doctrine and custom. But they all agree on one thing: that the foundation of their faith rests on three key events in the life of Christ, on the Nativity, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Everything else is window-dressing.
All three events have inspired not only vast swaths of liturgy and preaching, but also equally vast responses in the arts — in architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. These responses have always, like the Church itself at its best, moved with the times. The Renaissance painters, for example, portrayed Nativity scenes set in the landscape of their own time and place, with figures costumed in the attire of their own day. Houses of religion were built in the successive styles of every period, from Romanesque and Gothic beginnings to the neo-classical grace of Wren, to the solid modernism of Le Corbusier. All devout literature has spoken with a contemporary voice. And sacred music invariably employs an up-to-date idiom in the service of worship.
In all this creativity, the artists (perhaps more than some of the retrograde clergy) have been insistent that the Christian faith is a living reality, not just a museum piece. And this is especially evident in their response to the Passion.
The Isenheim “Crucifixion” by Grünewald captures the harsh fact of Golgotha with no holds barred: here is a body stark in its brutal end, the flesh livid, the limbs in havoc; this is shock art, that left no room for abstract piety in the Renaissance mind. A similar blunt realism informs the mediaeval crucifix in the foyer of the Poor Clares’ convent in Assisi. And both of these have the impact and immediacy of the twentieth-century Christ by Epstein in the chancel arch of Llandaff cathedral.
Literature has been not less graphic. Rolle’s fourteenth-century “Meditation on the Passion” is at once a pioneering masterpiece of vernacular prose, and a lurid evocation of tormented death. And the scriptural text of the St Matthew gospel received, in 1964, a film treatment by Pasolini, in which the Passion sequences were equally devastating.
It is in music, though, that the Passion has been most constantly and renewedly brought home to the faithful. From early on in the Christian era, it was commemorated daily during the Mass, in Gregorian chant; and the same music, in more elaborate form, empowered the various rites of Holy Week, the Reproaches, Tenebrae, the Adoration of the Cross, the Stations. Later, in the great age of polyphony, there were settings of the Lamentations by Victoria and Gesualdo, and Couperin set them later again for solo voices and organ. His younger contemporaries, Pergolesi and Vivaldi, set the “Stabat Mater” for solo voices and strings. Around the same time, Bach composed the supreme masterpiece of all church music in his “St Matthew Passion”. A generation afterwards, Haydn set the “Seven Last Words” for bass recitatives, severally followed by string quartet movements inspired by them. Four of his eminent successors in the nineteenth century set the “Stabat Mater”: Schubert, Rossini, Verdi, and Dvořák. And in the twentieth century, Penderecki composed a challenging but eloquent setting of the “St Luke Passion”.
All of these works have been a valid take on the Passion by composers who respond to it with authentic faith, and who do so in the language of their time and in turn with the sensibilities of their time. What they have offered to the faithful, century by century, is a reinforcement of the Passion’s true meaning in their lives, as essential to the redemptive process.
These rites are still observed by Christians world-wide, even though we live now in a largely post-Christian world. To them, every day of the year is transformed by the Passion, and then by the Resurrection. But of all days in the year, Good Friday is when the heart and soul are most mindful of the Cross.
