Dear Marion,

Thank you for your mail and your tolerance of my 
home-made  (do-it-yourself) theology. As I wrote 
last Tuesday, I sent that day's letter inspite of
being dissatisfied with both style and content. I've
made some additions as well as what I believe to be
improvements. My emendations are accessible to you at
http://home/earthlink.net/~ej1meyer/2011/d110518.00
but as always, there's no obligation to rehash what's
past; perhaps, enough is enough, and perhaps chewing
the cud should be left to the cattle.

As is so often the case, the subject is far from 
exhausted for me. My mind has no brakes which I can
apply in response to the stop sign at an intersection
of ideas, and as a result there is on occasion a
hurtful collision.  Maybe I should be taken off the
road.

However that may be, there's more that I want to write
about the esthetics of the crucifixion, considering
its literary, architectural, musical, pictorial and
theatrical facets.

So far as literature is concerned, the crucifixion
texts of St. Matthew and St. John, which I know by
heart from Bach's Passions by those names, I consider 
equal or superior to anything that Aeschylus, Sophocles,
Shakespeare, Hoelderlin, Schiller, Goethe, Kleist ...
have written. The circumstance that scholars of Greek
conventionally disparage as "koine" and exclude from
the canons of classical literature both the Septuagint
and the New Testament reflects the degree to which
their professions are societal affectations. The
classical scholars are offended by the circumstance
that those Greek texts, like the triads of crosses
at the edge of Interstate 81, have been appropriated
by the masses - koine - and therefore cannot qualify
as "etwas Besonderes."  Furthermore, the literary value
of the Biblical texts is obscured by the circumstance
that the Bible is, in fact, a library of very diverse
writings, a collection of texts that has been made
by committees whose selections were guided by
political and other non-esthetic, non-literary
considerations, and committees being what they are,
almost certainly also non-spiritual criteria.

One tends to forget that cathedrals, and larger churches
in general, have floor plans in the configuration of a
cross, I suspect it's a fortuitous coincidence of
religious symbolism with geometric utility. Compare
the ease of reciprocal accessibility of two points
in a "t" compared with a "c" or a "u" or a "z".
Occasionally the cross becomes integral also to vertical
sections of the building. Look at the rood screen of the
Naumburg Cathedral.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ej1meyer/2011/Naumburg_lettner.jpg
There the crucified Jesus is flanked on his right by his
grieving mother, on the left by his grieving disciple John.
The figures though not quite life-size are sufficiently large
to evoke the feeling of sharing with them the space in which
they live(d) and suffer(ed). It is this immediacy which to 
my mind distinguishes archtitectural from graphic
representation. There are without doubt other, many other
architectural expressions of crucifixion, but I myself am
somewhat familiar only with the Naumburger Dom. 

As for musical treatment of the crucifixion theme, I am
sufficiently versed only in Haendel's Messiah, in Bach's
Matthaeuspassion and Johannispassion. Haendel's treatment
is in one sense the most satisfactory, in that Haendel,
perhaps in deference to the large and influential Jewish
community in London which patronized him alludes to the
crucifixion only elliptically by setting to music not the
embarrassing historical accounts of the Evangelists, but
the almost inscrutable prophetic sentences of Isaiah.
Thus Haendel's music captures the spiritual essence
of the crucifixion while avoiding the depiction of its
barbarity. Bach's two Passions are different not only
from Haendel's Messiah, but also from each other. Die
Johannispassion incorporates into its libretto numerous
sections of a text by Barthold Heinrich Brockes: "Der
fuer die Suende der Welt gemarterte und sterbende Jesus."
Die Matthaeuspassion relies on supplementary texts by
a man, Christian Friedrich Henrici, who wrote popular
poetry under the penname Picander. Broeckes' poems are
ornate, sophisticated, stylized fashionable verse 
whereas Henrici succeeds in tempering Baroque conceits
with the directness and immediacy of heartfelt emotion.
In the St. Matthew Passion as in Cosi fan tutte and Don
Giovanni the genius of the librettist and the genius of
the composer supplement each other, with comparable
incomparable esthetic consequences, in that both Bach's
and Mozart's works derive their overwhelming effect from
the circumstance that the musical experience of the
listener is freed from being merely vicarious recapitulation
of the travails of remote fictitious or mythical personages.
What the listener hears becomes immediately, inescapably,
inseparably his own experience. That is my explanation for
why so many persons otherwise alienated from dogmatic
religion, my parents included, the St. Matthew Passion
provides with access to a world of religious dogma, ritual
and myth from which they would otherwise have been excluded
by their emotional and intellectual sophistication.

If I have little to write about the pictorial
representations of the crucifixion, this may be the
case because I have never learned to draw and therefore
the drawings and paintings are relatively inaccessible
to me, or because what is shown is so painful, so
horrifying, to frightning to me that I close my eyes,
emotionally, if not physically in self-defense. I try
to confront the challenge intellectually, logically,
by attempting to understand the crucifixion as an
ultimately unavoidable fact of individual and social
existence. Whether or not I succeed is another matter.

Finally, there's Oberammergau, the Passion Play, the
theatrical re-presentation of the Crucifixion, potentially
the most compelling reenactment of the tragedy; actually
the most depressing, dispiriting, vulgar and degrading.
I ask myself, why? Perhaps, because as distinct from a
tragedy written by Shakespeare or by Sophocles, the
crucifixion story was not written to be acted out.
To make the performance bearable or to keep it from
being tawdry, would require a chorus to mediate between
the awful reality reenacted and the spectator. I read
Shakespeare's plays as having a built-in chorus, voices
which define the manner in which events onstage are to
be understood by the spectator. Nothing of the sort in
the writings of the Evangelists who present terrifying
events in unmitigated nakedness, the wounds exposed,
unbandaged, the pain undisguised.  With all this said,
maybe I don't know what I'm writing about.  I've never
been to Oberammergau, and even if I weren't 81 years old,
I would never go.

Just now from "Embarque" - the new name of our old
telephone company. I succumbed to what I've not done
in memory: accepted an offer made by telephone.
This one for fast internet access at a very low price
with special conditions, including the option for
suspending service for 6 months each year, in effect
costing only $7.45 per month more than we're presently
paying.  Probably too good to be true, but a gamble
which I thought I couldn't afford not to take. The
ADSL modem should arrive in three or four days, giving
me two weeks to work on the unavoidable technical
problems of converting my video surveillance system
from telephone to ADSL connection.
.PP
Recent correspondence which might interest you,
a letter to my friend Cynthia Behrman:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ej1meyer/2011/d110515.01
and a letter to Margrit's friend Margret Steinrueck,
a semi-retired Berlin physician
http://home.earthlink.net/~ej1meyer/2011/d110516.00
Please keep me informed of your state of health and
write as frequently or infrequently as is best for you.

Jochen