A Meditation on Thaïs

This post was written by Michael Dodaro, and posted on January 16, 2009 | Filed Under uncategorized | Double-click any word for more info | View other posts by Michael Dodaro | | For info on this author, visit http://operaciv.blogspot.com/

In the ancient Egyptian city of Alexandria, built by the Greek architect Dinocrates to immortalize the name of Alexander the Great, the city of the library of the Ptolemies with its manuscripts of Plato, Pythagoras, Philo, Origen, Athanasius, and Clement, copies of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and documents signed by Julius Caesar and Octavian, the port city of lavish white sands and Mediterranean seascapes known to Cleopatra and Mark Antony, on the threshold of an evening in the fourth century, a connoisseur of the flesh is ruminating before her mirror on aging and mortality. She is Thaïs, a figure of mythic elegance, a courtesan, yet full of artistic refinements and imbued with elemental candor. In this moment of her only vulnerability, the monk Athanaël intrudes with his violent admonition from the desert. He is terrifying, driven as much by suppressed desire for Thaïs as by zeal to redeem her for eternal life. If renunciation of the world is the portal of eternity, Thaïs is singularly ill disposed. She sustains his initial assault then reacts with derision and ejects him, but he has disturbed the serenity of her opulence. In the lingering awareness of some strange enticement she begins to weaken. The fruit Athanaël has unseasonably harvested slowly intoxicates her.

The opera Thaïs by Jules Massenet dramatizes the climactic irony of Christian asceticism subduing pagan sensuality. After an evening alternating jubilance and bouts of sobbing Thaïs willingly rejects a wealthy suitor in her thrall to become a virgin seeking the bridegroom. She comes out of her house in the darkness to find the monk. Athanaël is asleep, but she wakes him to ask for spiritual guidance. He knows she will now submit to his discipline and says calmly that he will take her to a convent where she will wait for Christ to come and claim her. Then his severity returns. He commands her to set fire to her house and abandon her possessions, an ordeal to which she agrees, but she hesitates at destroying a piece of art that she loves. In rage Athanaël smashes it, and they trudge off into the wild.

The simplistic dichotomy that sets spirit and sensuality in opposition is bleak beyond recognition now among affluent, accommodating Christians, and born-again pagans who do not seriously consider eternal life an inducement to abnegation of the flesh. The irony of Massenet’s opera and the novel by Anatole France on which it is based is that after the pilgrimage through pain that Thaïs undertakes, she dies in ecstatic transcendence, while Athanaël recognizes in despair that he is in love with her. In abjection he regrets having driven her to this end. Modern Christians and secular humanists alike will feel some sympathy with Thaïs in her contemplation of mortality. Athanaël’s primal dilemma is compelling when desire is constrained by guilt or panic about being made into a eunuch for the Kingdom of God. The irony of our time is that Christians have expropriated the opulence of the world, whether the baroque Pentecostalism of televangelists and swinging mega-churches or the elegance of blue-blooded Episcopalian ritual, while California transcendentalists are surrendering themselves for the sake of enlightenment and following their spiritual masters into the Mojave. Everybody seems satisfied with the role reversal, so why revisit a false dichotomy that was history when Massenet set this primal religious drama to music?

Few have followed Jesus far enough along his via dolorosa to fully comprehend what is meant by his injunction, “take up the cross,” his foreboding that “a man’s foes will be those of his own household,” or that enigma for proponents of family values, “No man can come after me who does not hate father, mother, sisters and brothers, his wife, and even his own life.” In Massenet’s time these eschatological sayings evidently informed contemporary culture to an extent that opera houses could mount lavish productions based on them. The composer of the opera Thaïs claimed in his autobiography that the state of his soul was most apparent in his music. Evidently a veteran of the war of sensuality and spirit, Massenet clearly left the imprint of a strong religious impulse on his operas. Yet he had a reputation for womanizing. If he did battle in the conflict of spirit and sense, how was he able to work? Musical craftsmanship of his order of magnitude is not accomplished in a torpor or guilt. In Thaïs Massenet confronts the most severe injunctions of monastic asceticism. Thaïs, Manon, Herodiade, and Le Cid merge musical motifs and theology so convincingly that one might believe that he had either found a path to resolution of monumental spiritual questions or had equally monumental powers of metaphorical abstraction.

Perhaps the convulsion of abstinence, ecstasy, and despair with which the opera ends is one of the justifications we now have for putting limits on spiritual compulsions. Massenet’s music could possibly inform the beneficiaries of the twentieth-century sexual revolution. Having witnessed Athanaël’s despair, students traumatized by sex might hesitate at the impulse to abandon engineering studies or business school for a communal farm. At any stage in life those who are susceptible to extrapolations from the hard sayings of Jesus are more likely to find metaphors for dealing with them in enduring works of art from the past than in cinematic caricatures of religion or the music they are likely to hear in church. Better if we turn to the dramas Massenet set to music. Universally regarded as a fine craftsman of orchestration, he is the composer of twenty six operas, twenty three of which were staged. He had lavish and widely imitated lyrical gifts. The operas were the most performed of his era in the French musical theater, and they have proved their enduring value over most modern composers’ works, which seldom last beyond the fanfare of new productions.

The bourgeois audiences for Massenet’s operas were far removed from the heroic asceticism of desert monasteries. How might a performance of Thaïs at the Paris Opera have affected bourgeois women? According to Massenet’s biographers they were captivated by his music, which became the standard of the repertoire. It takes little imagination to see that many among the Parisiene would have found Thaïs a sympathetic character. She is urbane, cultivated in her tastes, beautiful, and most interesting of all, independent. A modern sex goddess might be the envy of many women, but she is seldom admired for her elegance. Thaïs is characterized as a woman of intelligence and grace as much as voluptuous allure. She entertains the Alexandrian nobility in sumptuous refinement in her own palatial home. She owns artistic masterpieces. Nicias, the only suitor who appears in the opera, is high caste Alexandrian. He has been a friend of the monk Athanaël since their youth and hosts the renunciate in his home. It is Nicias who has the influence to get Athanaël admitted to the home of Thaïs. Nicias has spent a fortune for a week in her company, but she has the power to eject him at will, and she does in order to retreat to a convent with the holy man.

Contemporary literary theorists find oppression of women in Western art and culture, yet here in a bourgeois French opera is a woman of independent means who voluntarily follows erroneous counsel to a conclusion that eviscerates her mentor, himself a spiritual athlete, while she is indestructible. The illogic of renunciation leads to her death, yet even in death Thaïs is indomitable. The husbands and lovers of the Parisiene would have been more the equivalent in property, influence, and character of the suitor, Nicias, than of Thaïs. Like Nicias, bourgeois men would have been willing at times to spend extravagantly on desirable women, but what could they have made of Thaïs? Shouldn’t they have considered her an affront? The opera was not extremely successful in early productions but it survived despite this protagonist of the supposedly oppressed gender. In every phase of her pilgrimage Thaïs embodies innate charm. Her musical motifs are gentile and forthright throughout her transformation from regal courtesan to saint.

Anatole France reportedly commented while working on his novel Thaïs, “I have only two enemies: Christ and chastity.” In the novel the monk Athanaël is characterized in even more rigorous excesses than in the opera. An episode, not used in the opera, has him take refuge from Thaïs on top of a column in a deserted city. The spectacle of him in the ruin becomes a tourist attraction, and the city is rebuilt and flourishes. Masssenet’s librettist, Louis Gallet, transformed the monk of this incident into the austere, tormented, yet impressive, Athanaël. The agony of love sublimated in evangelistic zeal remains in the opera but little of the scorn for him apparent in the book. One can only conjecture that in this contrast, librettist, composer, and box office patrons preferred a treatment of religious asceticism that was cognizant of the fact that in Augustine’s time it was considered the manly embodiment of saintliness. Witnesses to this outrage of renunciation contra indulgence now recognize it as fanaticism.

For as long as human beings have pondered mortality, renunciation of the world for spiritual purity has been one option for dealing with the horizon toward which we continually sail. Believing there is a reality that transcends the world we inhabit has for many inspired a compulsion to gaze so adoringly on the horizon that living in the present world becomes mainly a distraction. Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy provides a theoretical framework for abnegation of the physical world for an immaterial, ideal realm. Christian theologians in fourth century Alexandria fought a never completely successful battle with the hyper spirituality of Greek metaphysics. Physical indulgence as evident in the pagan religious ethos provided a stark contrast to the philosophers’ quest for eternal form underlying nature. In this context a religion that began with John the Baptist and culminated in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus seemed more consonant with the acetic world view than that of the pagan remnant.

The theological resolution that is often neglected is, of course, the doctrine of the Incarnation, in which the eternal transcendent God takes on human flesh and shares time-bound human existence. The Christological controversies of the third and fourth centuries proved just how difficult this is to deal with intellectually. Kierkegaard said it was an insurmountable intellectual problem comparable to the moral atrocity of Abraham offering his son Isaac on the altar. Without trying to disentangle the many threads of this discourse, we will only suggest that the resolution of the dilemma of Athanaël and Thaïs requires a thorough analysis of the doctrine of the Incarnation. Listen to the Thais Meditation.