Volume 48, Number 11 · July 5, 2001
A Deadly Misunderstanding
By Eamon Duffy
Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Houghton Mifflin, 756 pp., $28.00
On Good Friday 1979 I attended the service of Tenebrae at an English Roman Catholic church that was and is renowned for the splendor of its ceremonial and its choral tradition. Tenebrae had been for almost a thousand years the main service on each morning of the Triduum, or the solemn days of Holy Week from Maundy Thursday to Holy Saturday. In it, an elaborate series of Scripture readings and psalms apply to the sufferings of Christ on the cross the ancient sorrows of Israel, in particular, the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its inhabitants to Babylon. The heart of the service is the singing of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, each strophe preceded by the proclamation of its initial letter in Hebrew, set to a heart-wrenching chant—'Is it nothing to you who pass by: is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow?' One by one, as the psalms are sung, the candles on a great triangular candlestick set in the middle of the sanctuary are extinguished, until only a solitary light is left at the top, symbolizing the abandonment of Christ by his disciples. At the end of the service this candle is hidden and revealed again, a foreshadowing of his death and resurrection.
Review, 4172 words
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