Page 6 - Ruminations

4. Seismic reaction

The final movement of Haydn’s “The Seven Last Words of Christ”
(1786), mimics an earthquake: a portentous sign at the Crucifixion.
After more than an hour of slow movements, the orchestra woke up
its first Good Friday audience in Cadiz with a loud presto e con tutta la
forza. Haydn managed to convey both up and down and sideways
motion, the first with jagged rising and falling notes, and the second
with unstable swooping. He may also be indicating God the Father’s
displeasure in a series of warning calls at the beginning and a
slamming fortissimo at the end of the piece. It’s short but not sweet.
It may be supposed that both Haydn and the priest who
commissioned the work had memories of the Great Lisbon
Earthquake that shook up the West, literally and figuratively (Cadiz
was spared the worst of the tremor and ensuing tsunami). It happened
on All Saints’ Day, 1755. Europe was already in the throes of the
Enlightenment; this cataclysmic event marked a milestone in the
questioning of God’s will and stimulated scientific thinking about
geology. One may therefore wonder about Haydn’s—or any of his
contemporaries’—sensitivity to those famous last words: “My God,
why hast thou forsaken me?”
Thus it might, in retrospect, seem as if the Biblical author were
prefiguring not millennia of doctrinaire belief in salvation but
existentialism. If so, the withdrawn watchmaker-deity of the
Enlightenment might not be the source of our culture’s theological
skepticism. Rather, by creating such a stark contrast between divine
love and the hopelessness of the human condition (original sin),
Christianity began with internal contradictions sufficient to assure
repeated apostasy, schisms and heresies. When materialism became
strong enough to challenge theology’s ontological underpinnings in
the nineteenth century, many people experienced the terror of
abandonment, unable to comprehend a cosmos in which meaning did
not come top-down from an absolute authority.
Like war and genocide, natural disasters have the power to shake
one’s faith. The latter, however, are beyond human agency. After 1755
fewer Europeans might have been inclined to see divine intervention
in events like the one described in Matthew 27:51:

And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to
bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.