Word: sacrality
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...performed at its world premiere by the venturesome Hamburg State Opera, the three-act music-drama is a lurid vision of hell on earth. Horror builds to a crescendo as sacral scenes of church and cloister are followed by wild orgies of the possessed nuns and a ludicrous exorcising ceremony in which the crazed sisters howl, shriek and twitch like wolverines in heat. Present in nearly every scene is a revulsive chorus of guttersnipes, beggars, epileptics and whores who leap and leer with a demonic joy reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch...
...divine, then human, and then they were gone. This all took place between the creation of the Sphinx and the birth of Botticelli's Venus. The Egyptians could not know Aristotle, but he knew the secret of the Sphinx, for he laid down the basic dictum of all sacral art-"to depict the hidden meaning of things, not their appearance." It is easy, but incorrect, says Malraux, to think of the Egyptian tombs "as country houses in the Hereafter and the mummies as denizens of a world of never-ending childhood, buried with their toys of gold or clay...
Father Weigel begins with the premise of two orders, sacral and secular, governed by divine and human law. Each is autonomous in its own sphere. Divine law concerns man's relationship to God, human law his relationship to his fellow beings. The secular order is inferior to but not subject to the sacral. Man lives in both orders simultaneously, and when they conflict, it is commonly agreed that the individual abides by the dictates of his conscience whether he be Protestant, Jew or Catholic. With this basis stated. Father Weigel turns to some implied questions by "the thinking Protestant...