The Said Symphony: move 18 with cadenza
[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict — continuing ]
Move 18: The Lamb of God
Move content:
If you want it in short form, the move content here is: “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8) — note in particular the curious involvement of time in this formulation…
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The Lamb of God is a superposition, a simultaneous envisioning of multiple meanings with their inherent values – it’s a thought (concetto) in a style of thinking that once was and should properly be known by the name of Poetry – a style of thinking in which a rich cluster of meanings is concentrated, potentiated, distilled as wine is distilled into brandy.
It is not, therefore, simply a decorative motif for churches, hymnals and religious pamphlets, not is it that brilliant but weak thing, a metaphor. Layered after the manner of Blake‘s fourfold vision (move 4), it is at once:
the radiance of Godhead;
focused in the person, life and death of the window, Christ, through which that radiance streams;
in his act of permitting his own slaughter, nailed and bleeding, on the tree that echoes the tree in an eternal garden;
prefigured in his breaking of bread and offering of wine, wheat ground by millstone and grape trodden in winepress, the fruits of the earth, the seasons and human labor;
offered in substitution as a Passover sacrifice;
repeated wherever and whenever Eucharist is celebrated;
portending the great union to which we are invited, the Marriage Supper;
seen in the image of a lamb, a child of sheep…
through all of which the divine radiance takes form, is colored, may be glimpsed, may be made ours… by means of which — “take, eat, this is given for you” — we may be made his.
This sounds like religion, and no doubt it is – but the mode of perception required to apprehend it is not material, not literal, not within reach of camera or microscope or x-ray, of fact, but symbolic, transcendent, within the reach of insight, of poetry, of love.
Likewise, the relation of time with the timeless in sacrifice is expressed as poetic truth in the words “slain from the foundation of the world “.
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You may know these things from experience, you may see them as I write this, or this may all be as dust to you, the merest dull preachment, so many wasted pixels, so much spilled ink.
Perhaps I can convey some of the life of this matter through the works of great artists… for that is what they are great for.
Visually, the appropriate illustration would be the Adoration of the Lamb from van Eyck‘s Ghent Altarpiece, sonically the Agnus Dei from Bach‘s B Minor Mass – which I can happily present together in this video of John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists:
Here too, from Handel‘s Messiah, is the final chorus Worthy is the Lamb that was Slain and concluding Amen, sung by the Ichud Choir with the Herzliya Chamber Orchestra under Harvey Bordowitz:
I am particularly delighted to feature a choir and orchestra from Hertzliya here, because I generally associate Hertzliya with Dr Reuven Paz of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, a noted counter-terrorism (CT) analyst — and besides, a Jewish choir and orchestra singing Messiah is interesting in its own way. More on that later…
Links claimed:
To pigs, move 16: it is indeed a pleasure to move from the use of animals such as the pig in an imagery of hatred to that of the lamb in an imagery of love, and it may be noted that this shift accompanies the motif of sacrifice…
To Revelation, since “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” is a quotation from Revelation 13:8.
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