I need to add a P.S. to that blog entry from a couple days ago - three days ago, since I'm making an effort at fixing up sloppy facts here. The one about Allegri's Miserere.
Two errors in that piece. I won't try to label them as major or trivial. I'll leave that up to you.
My friend Margaret pointed out to me that my reference to Americans going from good guys to bad guys between the time they/we wrote that beautiful preamble to the Constitution (We the People) and the time they/we established the institution of slavery is all wrong. It's not that we fell off the wagon, as we seem to be doing these days in tossing democracy into the toilet and allowing full-blown idiots like Marjorie Taylor Greene - to name just one - to run the government. That's historically inaccurate. We started slavery well before our sacred document, the Constitution, came into being, and there are apologists today still banging on about how lucky those Africans were to be brought from the dark continent into the light where they were able to learn to read and write and become astrophysicists like Neil deGrasse Tyson. The truth is the collective "we" has always been made up of saints and sinners, brilliant astrophysicists and Marjorie-type people. That's the nature of a collective; it's always a mixed bag.
The second misrepresentation of the facts that I spread with that piece was that Pope Urban forbade the singing of the Miserere in any place other than the Sistine Chapel and that Mozart foiled the dictat and made corrections. All made-up, apparently.
At least if this other YouTube video is correct. And my guess is it probably is.
Without half trying, I was able to come up with two inaccuracies in one piece. I take that as a metaphor of the times. In the first case, I need a spanking for not proofing my draft of a blog piece before posting. If I had read it carefully, I could have caught the historical blooper.
In the second case, no spanking please. I was simply repeating an error, like so many urban legends flying around these days, that is so prevalent in the common consciousness as to be almost true.
Christ walked on water. Allegri wrote that high C into his Miserere in 1640. Factual facts or alternative facts? Does it matter that the high C was written by somebody else and added only in the 19th Century? Does it matter that the boy from Galilee never actually walked on water or raised folk from the dead? In the first case, that high C makes people believe there are such things as angels, and in the second that "death hath no sting."
And that raises the question of how important the difference is between truth and lies. Are lies OK if they are white? And if they make people feel better? Are people who are sticklers for historical and other accuracy nothing more than old bores with no imagination and no ability to enjoy flights of fancy?
I come from a German Lutheran tradition, a tradition of sticklers. You will remember that Frederick the Great, you know that marvelously progressive Prussian monarch, who liked to hang out (and allegedly bed, at times) with the boys in uniform and walk the garden paths at Sans Souci with the deist Voltaire, wanted the Protestants of his kingdom to be a united force when they went into battle against the Catholic Austrians (or at least that's the story I've been told), so he made the Calvinists and the Lutherans merge into a single new church henceforth to be called the German Evangelical Church (which it is still called today = "evangelisch" is German for "protestant" and the English "evangelical" is "evangelikal" in German.)
And - just checked - that "fact," that it was Freddie the Great, it turns out, is wrong. It wasn't Freddie the Great, the man's man (no women at our dining table or in our beds) king that united the churches, but two Freddies after him, Friedrich Wilhelm III. Glad to have that muddle cleared up.
But that's a digression. The point I was going for is that a whole bunch of Lutherans couldn't stand the idea of going to church with people who denied that Christ was "really present" in the communion host, but just "spiritually present" as the Calvinists claimed. And not, as the Catholics insisted, that the wafer and the wine became the "actual" body and blood of their saviour, but that he came in the flesh "in, with and under" the elements.
Anyway, the quarrel with the Calvinists and the forced union of churches led a whole bunch of righteous Lutherans to migrate to America where they ultimately formed the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and to this day refuse to allow Calvinists or other Christians to come to the communion rail. Some of them. Most Lutherans have now put that conviction aside. But don't miss my point. "Truth" and "Accuracy" matters. And even if you can't agree on what exactly that is, is it a single angel dancing on the head of that pin or an infinite number of them, you can fight to the death over it.
Which is in part why I write P.S. entries to blogs a few days after they go public. It's part of my tradition to bang on over accuracy.
No comments:
Post a Comment