Thai | Then Peterson

I want to remind everyone there again of the gathering tomorrow evening – Friday evening, May 10, 2024 – to honor the contributions of George L. Mitton. The event will take place at 7:00 PM in the upstairs great room at Legacy Village, 4146 North University Avenue, Provo, UT 84604.

Following this event, a new book has been published under the title Joseph Smith and our preparation for the Lord’s final judgment.

Early last night my wife and I observed a photo shoot in Salt Lake City for the Interpreter Foundation’s fast-approaching feature film Six days in August. The film’s Joseph Smith (Paul Wuthrich, reprising his role) was involved in the filming. To give evidence) and his Brigham Young (John Donovan Wilson), and was the first step toward creating movie posters, social media, and other key art for the film.

From there we went to a Utah Opera performance of Jules Massenet’s 1894 opera Thai. I thought I saw it Thai once before, many years ago, but I realized within about the first sixty seconds that this wasn’t the case.

I was surprised by it and amazed at how much I enjoyed it. (Of course, almost everyone is familiar with the famous violin meditation.) To some extent I enjoyed it because of its setting in fourth-century Egypt, a place (although not exactly a time) that I am very fond of. known. I first went to Egypt in January 1978, we lived in Egypt from the summer of 1978 to the summer of 1982, and since then we have visited Egypt more times than I can count – most recently in late October and last January.

But I would like to make a few comments about the opera and its performance last night. It is the story of Thaïs, a superstar courtesan in Alexandria, and of a devout Christian named Athanaël, who had apparently known her when they were both very young. A monk of Antinoe (or Antinoopolis) in the Western Desert – years ago I had the opportunity to visit the venerable and remote Monastery of St. Antony in the Eastern Desert and made repeated visits to the distant monasteries of Wadi Natrun in the Western Desert. Desert – Athanael is determined to convert her from her open devotion to Venus to his rigorous form of Christianity, and thus save her soul. He succeeds, but in the end he seems to have lost his.

I’ll start with the very last scene, which – not surprisingly for those who have been following my blog for some time – caught my attention. Only a few months after her repentance and conversion, Thaîs dies, and Athanaël realizes that he cannot bear the thought of losing her. He comes to her monastery and confesses his love for her, essentially renouncing his Christianity and asceticism, and begs her to live:

Not! le ciel. . . Rien does not exist. . . it is not that life and love are of things. . . . I love you!

No! Heaven . . . nothing exists. . . nothing is truer than life and love for (human) beings. I love you!

Here are Thaïs’s last words, spoken on her deathbed. I have omitted Athanael’s interjections and pleas:

Et la voilà de aurore! . . .
And voilà the roses of the matin! . . .
Le ciel s’ouvre! Voici lessons English and lessons prophets. . .
and teach saints! It’s a bad experience,
les mains toutes pleines de fleurs! . . .
Two séraphins aux blanches all planent dans l’azur,
and in doing this you imagine a second consolation
sur me yeux ses doigts de luminière!
Ah! en essuie à jamais les pleurs! . . .
Le son des harpes d’or m’enchante!
The soft perfumes pénètrent me!
You feel an exquisite bliss,
Ah! Ah! An endormir tous mes maux bliss! . . .
Ah! le ciel! Je voix… Dieu!

And here is a somewhat loose English translation, partly but not entirely my own, of her last words:

And here is the dawn! . . .
And there the roses of the eternal morning! . . .
The heavens open! Here are the angels and the prophets. . .
and the saints! They come with a smile,
their hands full of flowers! . . .
Two white-winged seraphim float in the azure sky
and, as you said, places the kind Comforter
on my eyes are fingers of light!
Ah! dries them of tears forever! . . .
The sound of the golden harps enchants me!
Soft scents pierce my soul!
I feel an exquisite bliss,
Ah! Ah! A bliss that soothes all my pain! . . .
Ah! Heaven! I see . . . God!

Whether it is Massinet or his librettist Louis Gallet (or the Nobel Prize winner Anatole France, about whose 1890 novel Thai, which I have not read, on which the opera is based) came up with her last words out of pure imagination, whether they are based on the last words of others, I don’t know. But some will recognize that they are very similar to many stories of so-called “deathbed visions.” The ecstatic references to light, music, beautiful scents, welcoming heavenly beings, peace and exquisite happiness. . . These are textbook elements of such reports.

Other thoughts also occurred to me last night. It is the physical rigors of her months of guilt that ultimately kill Thaïs, and I thought how faith in Christ’s atonement might have provided a happier ending without such a demanding penance. The Restored Gospel emphasizes repentance but does not require self-mortification or self-destruction. And a non-celibate, non-monastic form of Christianity would have allowed Athanael to marry Thaïs, whom he clearly loved and who possibly loved him back. There should be no absolute gap between loving God and feeling affection or love for God’s children. Athanael’s frustrated love may have destroyed him, and their suffering was unnecessary.

But I was particularly put off by a certain modern misinterpretation of the story, which was evident in both the program notes and the audience reaction:

The program notes mention “religious hypocrisy” as one of the themes of the opera. But I definitely don’t see Athanael as a hypocrite. To me – and I would appreciate readers’ opinions on this – a hypocrite is someone who publicly professes a principle or set of principles but privately doesn’t really believe in it, or regularly, consciously, deliberately and rather gleefully breaks the rules . them. Examples of this include a politician who proclaims his commitment to “family values” but who regularly makes secret arrangements with his mistress and, while claiming to be pro-life, pays for her abortion. Or a politician who campaigns based on her deep concern for the poor and downtrodden, but who gives nothing to charity and exploits and abuses her cleaning lady.

However, Athanaël is depicted in the opera as sincerely pious, authentic and deeply religious, albeit tormented by a deep attraction to Thaïs. That attraction only emerges after he goes to Alexandria in what seems to have been a sincere attempt to bring her back from a life of ostentatious devotion to superficial sensuality. As he takes her to the desert area of ​​his monastery and her destined monastery, driving her mercilessly and demanding that she punish her body as penance, she collapses. It is then that he recognizes her inner purity, her goodness and the utter sincerity of her conversion:

Ah! des gouttes de sang coulent de ses pied blancs. La pitié s’émeut en mon âme! Pauvre child! Pauvre woman! J’ai trop longé cette épreuve! Pardonne-moi, ô ma soeur, ô sainte Thaïs! O holy one, très holy Thaïs!

Ah, drops of blood drip from her white feet. Pity moves my soul. Poor kid! Poor woman! Oh holy Thais, oh my sister! – I have prolonged this severe ordeal too long! Forgive me. (He kneels down. Weeping, he kisses her bleeding feet in adoration.) O holy, most holy Thais!

Clearly, this isn’t just lust. Moreover, to yield to a powerful temptation, after vigorous resistance, seems to me not merely an example of hypocrisy, but simply of human weakness and fallibility.

However, the audience did not respond well to the – I think – three times that Athanaël prays for the strength to resist the powerful temptation of Thaïs’ charm and beauty. There was a burst of laughter every time. I assume that those who laughed did not believe that his prayers were sincere, that he was merely a lecherous man who paid lip service to his professed beliefs. But this seems completely misplaced to me. The opera itself portrays him as deeply disturbed after taking Thaïs to the monastery and returning to his own monastery. His fellow monks worry about him; For weeks he does not eat, does not drink and rarely speaks. He confesses his torment to his superior at the monastery, who offers no real help, but simply bids him farewell and walks out. Only then does Athanael leave his monastery to visit the dying Thaïs, confess his guilty love and beg her to live.

I wondered what the audience’s laughter meant: are modern people simply incapable of taking an oath or vow seriously? Are we mocking and mocking the idea of ​​moral restraint and moral effort? Do we no longer believe in the possibility of human goodness, or of genuine human efforts to achieve it? To be honest, that laughter bothered me a lot.

I was shocked today to hear from a friend about the death of former Utah Congressman Chris Cannon: “Former Utah Rep. Chris Cannon Dies at 73.” One of Chris’s younger brothers was a missionary companion of mine – more than once, in fact – in Switzerland, and shortly after I returned I met his entire remarkable family. Chris and I even lived for a short time with several others in a house on the southwest corner of the BYU campus that had long since been razed and, fittingly, replaced with a larger parking lot for Brick Oven Pizza.

Chris was a good man. He left a mark and he will be missed.