There are two interpretations of art in Plato:
1. Art is a copy of nature which is an imperfect copy of eternal form, ergo, art is dubious; it is likely to lead us away from the ideal. Art is, on this view, even more of an illusion than the existing world from which it is taken. The essential world is immaterial, but real. From this Platonic dichotomy comes the existentialists’ problem of existence versus essence.
2. Rather than being an imperfect copy of nature, which, by Plato’s definition, is inferior to the essential realm of pure form, art is said to be divinely inspired and thus a purer vision of reality than empirical knowledge.
Greek metaphysics was pervasive in the ancient near east. In the Bible there is evidence of conflict between Hellenic and Hebrew thought. Jesus often seems to be caught between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, who were the liberals and the conservatives of his time. The Sadducees were accommodating to cultural trends, which among the intelligentsia tended to be Hellenic. The Pharisees maintained resistance to Greek influence. But there was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible called the Septuagint. Philo’s works are an attempt at synthesis of Greek metaphysics and Hebrew thought.
By Augustine’s era, especially around Alexandria in Egypt, a philosophy called NeoPlationism was among the prevailing ideologies. The core of this philosophy is a repudiation of the material world. Two opposed corollaries were deduced from the NeoPlatonic idea that the material world is inferior to the spiritual realm:
1. Acetic renunciation of the world and the flesh.
2. Libertine indulgence of the flesh.
Plotinus, the most notable exponent of NeoPlatonism, and one of Augustine's teachers, was an acetic of the former type, unkempt and unwashed. There have been and are many Gnostic sects, and they tend to be NeoPlatonic. As opposed to moden agnostics who claim not to be able to know anything about God, the ancient gnostics claimed to have secret knowledge of the eternal transcendent reality. Some of them despised the world and the flesh. Others indulged in sexual libertinism in the belief that it didn’t matter if one abused the flesh, since it is only transitory.
All of this muddled conceptual theology was and is a challenge to a clear understanding of the Christian idea of the Incarnation of God in human flesh. The Gospels add to the dilemma when they quote Jesus in eschatological sayings about taking up the cross and following him even to the detriment of one’s safety and familial obligations. For example, he says, If any man would come after me, he must hate his mother and father and even his own life.
The Incarnation of God in human flesh resolves some problems associated with the Platonic and NeoPlatonic dualism between the existing world and an eternal transcendent realm. During the Christological controversies of the third and fourth centuries many attempts were made to conceptualize the Incarnation and the Trinity. After the passage of many centuries, Kierkegaard argued that it is impossible to conceive an eternal transcendent God becoming existential, material, and time bound. Existence preceeds essence for existing individuals, so we can only make a leap of faith. There is much more in Kierkegaard about the scandal of God as man that leads to offense or the liberation of faith.
How does this help us deal with the musical controversies in our churches?
1. It should elevate the value of art in worship. If God can be incarnate in human flesh, the sensory medium of art is not inferior to the rational exposition of doctrine.
2. It should negate the idea that it is irrelevant how we worship. In many respects, the medium of our worship is the message.
3. It should increase our regard for art that has proved its worth by enduring through many centuries. Culture is cumulative. Excellence is built on many stages of discovery and adaptation.
4. It should increase the value of emotion, because the abstract presentation of doctrine is not by virtue of its rational format superior to human experience.
5. It should encourage freedom and not rigid conformity to idealized form.
6. It should increase our regard for the human body and affirm beauty.
7. It should promote diversity of understanding of beauty without making all things relative to current fashion.
8. It should encourage love of life, the created world, and other people.
9. It should affirm our individual aspirations and uncontaminated desire.
10. It should make enlightened self expression acceptable to God. Self denial in this interpretation is denial of the destructive and sinful desires to which we are prone. Being all we can be is the best way to serve God and inspire others.
See also: http://church-alienation.blogspot.com/2005/04/all-shook-up-music-passion-and.html
39 comments:
That's a nice, concise historical account of Platonism and the pressure it has exerted on Christianity over the centuries.
My only quibble is that it still maintains a somewhat reserved and negative tone, "the sensory medium is not inferior"; it's not "irrelevant how we present the truth"; etc.
Can we arrive at a more positive assertion regarding the contiuum between the passions of the body and and the life of the spirit? In many ways, it seems to me a more fully Augustinian perspective, than the Greek one that allows both passion and the body to remain second-class citizens, as it were, in Plato's Republic, the point of which after all was to allow us to describe justice in the individual human soul, not merely or even primarily the city. Augustine resisted both Manichean dualism by asserting the intrinsic good of every created thing, and denying the possibility of ontological evil. This, it seems to me, must include the passions of the body. They must be good in themselves, (in context and with a healthy orientation, of course), and not ravenous beasts that must be constantly held in check by Sovereign Reason.
If this is the case, then we cannot accept Carson Holloway's normative account of a musical education, which pretty much just follows Plato in demanding that the passions always be calmed by reason, that music and its role in education must always be administered with an eye to elevating reason over the other parts of the soul. On the closest examination of Both Plato and Aristotle, particularly in The Republic and Ethics, respectively, we find a basically antagonistic relationship between reason and passion. This is the driving impetus behind Holloway's account of music and the soul, and it's my beliefe that a fully-realized incarnational Christianity must challenge it. Otherwise, we seem to be on track towards an anthropology that sees desiring itself as intrinsically, ontologically evil. The Hellenic view is in need of much more remediation than Holloway gives it.
It seems we're mostly in agreement theologically, Dave. In fact, I tried to indicate my own quibbles with Holloway’s thesis without negating my sense that he is on target about the problems of contemporary music. The current understanding of art seems to assume that it is either self expression or propaganda. What is called serious contemporary music is in many cases propaganda for the ideology that there is no objective reality. This is the end of a long history of philosophical nominalism that argues that metaphysical form is irrelevant or simply absent. William of Occam is the most notable proponent of this theory, and he was no doubt partly in justifiable reaction to medieval scholasticism. Pop music has taken over the realm of the emotions and various dimensions of humanity because serious art is in revolt against normative form. The result is a new kind of dualism between an arbitrary definition of form and sentimental or shocking pop music. The idea that there are distinctions to be made in various kinds of pop music and even in music by the same musicians seems valid to me. Even Mick Jagger is not beyond making good music some of the time, even if it is not the music I want to listen to in church. Another problem is that pop music, good or bad, is simply obliterating music that has stood the test of time and proved its worth.
I'm not sure how much pop music "obliterated" classical music. I understand how the ubiquity of pop and the dearth of good symphonic and classical music might make it seem that way. But I think the classical world was well on its way to self-imploding long before Elvis. The self-consciously audience-shunning modern theory of Adorno, Shoenberg and co. did more damage in that regard than Tupelo's favorite son could have ever dreamed of.
But we are in agreement here on just about everything. Occam bad. Nominalism bad. Return to formalism and realism needful. Check.
But let me excercise this thesis on you. This rupture you describe, between form and content in pop music is actually the result of an ongoing Christian polemic, much like the one we're having. Let me explain.
Rock, in its earliest form, was gospel with a (slightly) heavier beat, an R&B spin. This is simple history: Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis all derived the energy of earliest rock from gospel music, not the blues, which don't make a substantive appearance until the British re-export our own back to us, reguritated (how appropos, that) through the stylings of the Stones, Clapton, Yardbirds, et. al.
But the original impetus of rock grew out of African-American Christianity, which expressed itself close to the earth, with the passion and rhythm of work and sweat, developed without the European repose that made things like counterpoint and sophisticated harmonic development possible. Add to that the fact that African culture had no Platonic baggage, no nascent dualism to deal with (in fact the pagan religions of Africa, unlike the Baccanalia of ancient Greece, was more incarnational: cf. Eileen Southern) and you've got a crisis in the making: African Christianity declares that spritual liberation and physical liberation, spiritual ecstasy and physical ecstasy are closer than the European mind would ever have allowed. This seeps its way into the soil of Southern culture, into the imaginations of Presely, Lewis, et. al., and vivifies the inherent incarnational instincts that the Christian imaginations wants to affirm to begin with. This sets them on a collision course with institutional Christianity, which of course resists such apparent profligacy with all its might.
Case in point: Waxahaxie, Texas, the Southern Assemblies of God College, a revivalist asks a young gifted pianist named Jerry Lee to assist him in a rendition of "My God is Real." The lean young man proceeds to fuse the pentecostal rave-up with barrelhouse enthusiasm and finds himself promptly expelled. Lacking a sophisticated theological apparatus to counter this puritanism, he accepts his fate as a scoundrel, misfit and base seducer: The Killer is born. I can tell similar stories of Elvis and Richard Penniman. Confronted with this denial, and probably taking no small amount of glee in the power they've discovered to tweak the establishment and make girls scream in one swivel of the hips,, Elvis and co. take the ridiculous nature of rock and roll and exagerate it, never fully accepting the dualism that's been forced on them, but neither are they capable of reconciling the apparent contradictions themselves. So Elvis makes a gospel record for every three rock records almost until the day he dies, and follows up a bordello scene in his 68 comeback special with a Holy Ghost gospel revival scene, the former so explicit it was banned from the original broadcast, the latter done with equal earnestness and spiritual fervor. This is the essential dualistic tension that rock has lived with from the beginning. Andy Warhol only thought he was making fun of Elvis, but in reality Elvis was making fun of himself, and (as he saw it) the absurdity of the institutional resistance to his music.
This is the question: how do you reconcile, on the one hand, the sometimes overstated but hard to deny accusations that rock is base hedonism...and on the other, the religious origins of the music and all the other critics like Steve Turner, who argue the opposite, that it's an aspiration for the divine, that it's religious at its core.
I think the answer is something like this: Rock and Roll begins in the intuition that life in this world, and all its passions ARE in the same contiuum with the passion of the Christian divinity, and then runs smack up against the puritan and neo-Platonic denial of that in Christian institutions. Rock and Roll is a Christian polemic.
Very interesting, Dave. I don't want to argue with it. I do think the question of the European tradition in music is still important. Harry Burleigh was Dvorak's copyist and must have learned something from the him. And there is the question of how pop music began to verge on pornography. Something has gone badly awry.
There are many kinds of pop music that have not turned ugly. Have you read “If it ain’t got that Swing, The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture,” by Mark Judge? I’m no expert on this stuff and clearly you are. You might want to query Spence Publishing about a book along this line.
Yes, I agree with all of that -- there's no doubt something is deeply wrong with pop music. I'm not gonna defend Marilyn Manson or celebrate the glories of vulgarity.
I haven't read the Judge book, but I'm familiar with the basic thesis, which says something to the effect that the resurgence of swing was a return to older, more sophisticated forms of courtship, a kind of non-Victorian formalism. I like the idea, but I think it kinda lives and dies with the swing trend, which lasted just about long enough for Judges book to go to press. Maybe I should read it before I pass judgement though.
I have thought about a book for some time. This is probably the first time I've collected the basic thesis in one spot. I'll probably start researching and writing in earnest later this spring. Your feedback has been very encouraging and helpful -- you're exactly the (kind of) guy I'd want to engage with this argument.
So it isn't an argument, at least for my part. I used to have Holloway's email address. You should ping him about this. If you can't find him online I think I can find his address. Now that I think of it, Spence is not accepting queries, but send me mail and we can explore this offline.
All I can remember at the moment about the metaphysical poets is their use of miraculous or impossible images that were meant to convey meaning that is in, but not of, the visible world. In the sense that this technique is used by both John Donne and Oldham I get the point. Both are alluding to a dimension of the world that is spiritual without being immaterial. So, am I correct that when you say rock musicians are “witnessing” to a Christian reality, you mean this spiritual dimension of the physical world that materialists deny? Is it rock against Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett?
I just edited a book review of Dennett's latest effort by a friend, so I suppose I was a student who was ready for the teacher to appear. I can't fully appreciate the parallelism because I'm so unlearned in the idioms of popular music. As I told Ray, I wouldn't know a U-2 tune from a U-2X4. All this must have quite an impact on people who feel the alienation from themselves that Dawkins and Dennett "inspire". Even when it comes laced with some of the other poisonous elements of pop music.
Holloway has not completely missed this revolt against the Lucrecian/Epicurean materialism in the modern era. He takes it up in his discussion of Romanticism. The transcendentalists in this country covered some of this ground. But Holloway runs into Wagner and Nietzsche and follows that trend of hyper-Romanticism where it leads.
My opinion--but, I'm not sure if rock was really much of a revolt against the spirit of our age. Except in its style of the corporate man in the gray flannel suit--his swing music, crew-cuts and button-down shirts. As I remember those times were too buttoned-down. Something had to give, but when it did, it revolted only in style, not in essence.
After all the 1960s-1990s sturm and drang, rock has become the current Muzak. It used to be Lawrence Welk.
Weren't Strauss waltzes considered radical music back in the 1840s? I can't remember why.
It's interesting that you bring up _Man in the Grey Flannel Suit_, the Gregory Peck film. It chronicles the spiritual detachment of a WWII veteran, and is one of the few post-WWII films to treat the moral effects of war on a nation directly and honestly, in a way that we wouldn't be accustomed to until after Vietnam. Most other cultural indicators in the late 40s and early 50s were of prosperity , Ozzie and Harriet, bobby socks, etc. But underneath the sterility of that vision was a spiritually-cauterized nation and a generation of fathers that would find it difficult to connect with their children. _Grey Flannel Suit_ captures the ambiguity of victory perfectly.
It's my view that this spiritual detachment set the stage for the hyper-romantic view of the sixties. But there were moderate voices in the Christian community that sensed something was wrong as well, in particular Percy's _The Moviegoer_, and lets not forget that Tolkien's most visible early fanbase in the US were hippies.
So much of the 60's counter-culture was driven by a sense of the need for spiritual and moral authenticity that couldn't be found in Leave-it-to-Beaver world. I'm not endorsing the standard rejection of the nuclear family, but it has to be acknowledged that all was not well for the boomer generation, and that much of their demands were driven by a strong, if out-of-control, moral instinct: abhorrence of war and civil injustice for starters, which are essentially Christian in origin. Whatever we may think about the eventual bankruptcy of the moral legacy of the 60's it's simplistic to argue, as E. Michael Jones and others have, that it was simply the result of communist secular ideas propogated by the Frankfurt School and Jewish emmigre intelletuals. There was fertile ground for the revolt, and the post-war context and the spiritual condition of the nation has to be taken into account.
Dave--
I agree with you about the sterility of the 1940s-1950s, which led to the open revolt ten years later. As I remember it, it seemed to be a period where making money was the only thing that was important. Spirituality was reduced to appearances and no one questioned anything very much. There was a great deal of sin, like adultery and alcoholism, but it was kept under cover also for appearance sake. Appearances meant everything and were defended fiercely, but underneath was a vacuum.
But when revolt came that tore off the mask of appearances to reveal the sins and emptiness beneath--did the revolt itself truly change things or did it allow what was rotten underneath to continue to moulder albeit openly? If that is the case, then what did the 60s revolt accomplish in the end?
In the beginning, the revolt did address issues like civil injustice before it was swerved away from finishing that work by Vietnam protests. But along with that was, since the late 1940s, a parallel revolt against the Judeo-Christian ethos led by Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg and others of the Beat Generation. This revolt converged with, even provided the spiritual energy behind, all the other ferment. Soon the whole scene became a swamp of extremely atomized spiritualities and issues that provides only a different style of cover on the same old emptiness.
What would make a true revolt? What would it take to fill the emptiness? I believe it is to be found in Christian belief, but now it must be explained and experienced far deeper than it has ever been before if the culture is to come back to it again. So far that has not been done. After their initial revolt, many boomers have come home to "Leave it to Beaver" instead.
I can see that rock musicians are trying to jolt their listeners into awareness of exultant physicality. Interesting too that the conflict between pagans and the ancient Hebrews was not about flesh and spirit; the Hebrew Bible is not spiritualistic by any stretch of the imagination. But, Christianity under the influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism veered off in ascetic and Gnostic heresies toward hatred for the flesh. We have to make careful distinctions here, because there are Christian canonical texts that call for subjugation of the flesh, and the eschatological sayings of Jesus must be distinguished from those of later mystics who tried to meditate or torture themselves into a pure spiritual consciousness. The Incarnation and the resurrection clearly contradict the spiritualists, whether they are ascetics or Presbyterians. Calvin banished all music but plainsong chant from his churches. He argued that harmony was carnal and self-indulgent. But this was, it seems, in reaction to the renaissance revival of "pagan" art. Getting this right is not easy, but it's not impossible either.
I should admit my bias in favor of rock music as an affirmation of the body in opposition to Calvinistic or mystical spirituality. Over the years I've often been told that opera is too physical. The passion and pathos of opera are formalized and refined musically, but raw physicality is also evident. I find an affirmation of life in the body in opera similar to what Dave finds in rock music. Apparently there is also an awareness of the sublime in some rock music. In the review that started this discussion I wrote that rock music is the equivalent of nuclear war against moral and rational thinking. Now I would have to add that it is also an outrageous satire at the expense of Pharisaism and Calvinistic rationality.
Another piece in First Things that you might find interesting, Dave, is my review of David McCracken's book, The Scandal of the Gospels. Note particularly Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of "carnivalized scandal".
An encounter with Jesus, in this view, is so jolting, scandalous, that one is either offended or liberated by faith.
I think asceticism is vastly misunderstood. There is probably no one more conscious of the body than the ascetic who is trying to bring it under control. For example, just think of all the fasting he must do in the normal course of a liturgical year (in Orthodoxy it's half the year). For Westerners, think of what you give up for Lent, and how much you miss what you've given up. The resulting obsession to what one has fasted shows the ascetic how much power the body can have. It takes training then to overcome the obsession.
Mystical Christianity is not trying to deny the body, it is trying to make the spirit regain its proper domination over the body so that the two can worship in harmony together. The body is always to be the Temple where God's spirit dwells, where God incarnates himself. But where the spirit doesn't reign over the body, the body will certainly make sure each and every one of its passions and cravings will be satisfied. In this kind of undisciplined life, where the body's passions rule, the spirit is either atrophied or gone altogether.
I do not think the rock music affirms the body. What does it affirm about it? When it excites its passions, does it make it into a temple? Or even maintain its humanity? Or does it drive it into the animal realm, there to mire itself into instinct instead of raising it to reason?
The ancient Greeks, Buddhists and Hindus etc treat the body as something to be cast aside--that because the body sins, suffers and dies only the spirit must matter. This is not the true Christian teaching. It is true,though, that Greek pagan philosophy did influence Christian thinkers, especially in the West, and the various Christian heretical sects. But these pagan beliefs should not be ascribe to mystical Christianity.
I'm not the man to defend rock music, but I will say that the mystics I've read sound a lot like Athanael in the opera Thais. The end of that story is tragic.
Maybe Dave will come back to deal with the excessive passion and often immoral evocaions of rock music. I'll try to deal with the excessive passion and often immoral evocations of opera and opera singers. But right now I'm going to have to pay attention to business or I may end up living as a hermit in the eastern Washington desert.
All well and good, Dave, but where do you find any of this in "The Rolling Stone" or any other artifact of rock culture? I can point to numerous operatic arias that express these conceptions of life in the body, many of them that are, in fact, prayers. Where is the sublime vision of rightly ordered desire in rock and roll music?
Dave--
You said: "It is sin that diminishes desire by diluting it through indulgence, and misdirecting it towards the self rather than its proper object. Moderation is not ultimately supression but indulgence: the connesuer knows when to stop eating because he knows when he is satisfied."
And "Song of Solomon gives us a great picture of God's intent for the desires of the body, and it has nothing to do with moderation. It has to do with context and rightly-directed desire."
Yes, this is true, but since we live in this fallen world where the appetites are so often twisted and "the desires are diluted by indulgence", as you say, the full satisfaction, the healthy and full consummation you speak of does not often happen in a sin-enslaved world.
The ascetic practice is to detach oneself, wholistically, from the sin from corrupted desire, not from desire itself. The desire is what takes us to God. To re-order one's desires takes discipline, just as an impulsive, poorly behaved child must be disciplined, until such time that one's desires are rightly directly and in the proper context.
This discipline does involve "moderation" because, for example, if one doesn't eat, one dies, but if one indulges too much, one dies from obesity. Moderation allows a spiritual athlete to guide his bodies along a saner path, but moderation is not the end in itself, but the fullness in God.
Correcting my last statement:
It should read--Moderation allows a spiritual athlete to guide his bodies along a saner path, but moderation is not the end in itself, but the fullness in God is the goal.
I've heard a good bit of black gospel, and I wouldn't say that it makes good Christian music. It is extremely indulgent to the emotions, to chaos in worship and to lack of physical control. The black churches today are in poor spiritual condition in part because of black gospel.
Black Gospel was borrowed its forms from dance hall and brothel tunes that were "christianized" by Tommy Dorsey verses. At the time it was introduced, many black churches had opposed it because of where the tunes came from. It quickly made inroads in the more free-wheeling pentecostal black churches and later made its way into the main-line denominations of black churches. By the early 70s, black gospel began to use rock n roll forms beginning with Edwin Hawkins--"O Happy Day" in 1970.
Some years ago, I visited a black church that was in all respects like many other black churches I visited over the years, except for one thing. During their Sunday School hour, there were several old men who taught various groups gathered in different places in the pews. When Sunday School ended, these old men began singing something very old that sounded almost liturgical--it was so very unlike the style that the choir sang later. What these men sang was soaringly beautiful, expressive and soulful, what the choir sang was full of bombast, noise and silly, indulgent choral arrangements which was not inspiring, liberating or even pleasing to hear.
Artistic categories that may help:
1. Art is self expression: joy, pain, disillusionment, despair, jadedness, or whatever, are expressed in music that communicates these things to the listener. The listener can feel the emotions and may learn from the experiences of the artist.
2. Art is beautiful for its own sake: form is important and is arguably metaphysical.
3. Art is didactic: the morality plays from which opera developed were part of the teaching ministries of the church
4. Art is propaganda: A great deal of serious contemporary art is in this category. John Cage may have been a nice man, but his art is nihilistic propaganda.
5. Art does not exist: on this view everything is art and nothing is art. Whatever exists is right.
MARGARET SMITH
A HOLY STRUGGLE
This is the most sympathetic piece I've ever written about the monastic life. It's a short review of a book, written in sonnet form, which imagines the struggles of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was also a priest.
Dave said: "I think it's interesting that the harder one tries to deny the orthodoxy and legitimacy of Black Gospel at its best, the less Hebrew and more Hellenistic one's rationale becomes."
What's orthodox about black gospel? According to whom? As for its legitimacy--what makes it legitimate? Wouldn't the question of orthodoxy and legitimacy depend what church party accepts it--it is not legitimate across the board. Would an Ethiopian Church in America accept it? They're black, they're even more African, and they've certainly have had their share of the blues over the centuries.
Music's function in a church setting is to provide the dialogue between a congregation and God. In ancient times, chant and hymn singing were the way to do this. Singing is seen by liturgical writers as an alteration of the normal cadence of speech to signify one's entering into another realm, just as when one entered a church from the outside one behaved in a more sacred manner in the sacred space.
But singing has come to be used to express our secularity--our sentimentality, romance, depair, bawdiness, hate, martial spirit, sheer fun or sell products etc. Nothing evil about this--and I didn't say that the songs of Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington etc were evil. They are secular in intent, and the tunes and words reflect this worldliness.
Since singing can be both sacred and secular, how do we know what kind of spirit is being sung in our churches? Is singing sacred songs to be regarded as a denial of the secular? Or shouldn't our flesh get its affirmation in the sacred as it participates in sacred singing? Or should the spirit be made to affirm the passions of the flesh by singing its tunes in its way, however it feels that day?
Tommy Dorsey himself said where he got the tunes--it wasn't the spirituals. He said also who opposed his using these tunes. See the film--"Say Amen, Somebody."
Black gospel music is like the rest of the CCM scene--entertainment for Christians, not very condusive for worship. There have been some good songs in it over the years, but overall it is entertainment.
Black spirituals are not the same musical form as black gospel. There is something much more pure and simple about them--they contain a genuine feeling of a directed reverence and worship in them. In addition, many of those songs were in the form of a litany--the call and response that's so basic to the dialogue of a liturgy. So when Mahalia Jackson or Marian Anderson sang spirituals--of course, they sounded sublime and beautiful--the sounds of worship, not of entertainment.
As a matter of fact, back in my younger years, I liked Walter Hawkins very much and attended a concert featuring him and 100's of other black gospel artists back in 1979. I listened to black gospel stations a great deal during the 1970s when black gospel started to take on rock forms and there was a rush to Christianize current secular tunes. I liked the O'Neill twins, too and the Thundering Clouds of Joy put on a memorable performance when one of the singers lept 10 ten in the air and landed in the audience and began to boogaloo. The audience went wild.
I was aware of the cross-over scandals--later on, black rock artists would be interviewed and asked about their church background. "Were you baptist or methodist? I thought I heard the baptist in your music."
But black gospel isn't the best form for worship. Perhaps that's where we are having the misunderstanding...if you enjoy listening to the Dixie Hummingbirds or whoever, I see nothing wrong with that. But I regard it as a "tune" not a hymn.
Welcome Charles!
Thanks for your comment and many thanks also to Dave for his good postings. This has been great.
I have to sign off for the night, and Mike will join us again as soon as he can. But we'll go at it again tomorrow and address Charles and Dave.
Thanks guys--continue to post!
Hello, Charles. Thank you very much for adding your thoughts to our conversation. There is so much exciting detail in your post. This sentence alone is stunning to contemplate:
"In 1 Cor 15:44 Paul apparently opposes the physical body and the spiritual body. In fact a better translation of the Greek is "psychical" not physical. We should understand the opposition to be between the corruptible body and the spiritual body."
I have neglected the Greek I studied in school, but this "psychical not physical" translation corresponds with, and helps to explicate, about forty years experience in the battle to understand Paul along these lines. Eschatology is not for amateurs. Unfortunately, we amateurs live with the consequences of the meager understandings we can bring to bear in our various existential dilemmas.
Artists have a most difficult struggle with Paul on exactly this point, just as we have been discussing. The opera Thais and others by Massenet are very eloquent in their rendering of the drama of the mistaken dualism of spirit and sense.
Classically trained singers bear torments that might be compared, only partly in jest, to an "intrapersonal disjunction in the resurrected state" as you have so expertly dissected it. Another of Paul's memorable phrases is more correctly applied in this analogy, that of creation groaning while it waits for the consummation, but I couldn't resist your idea. If I can borrow Scribe's metaphor, I would argue that singing the kind of music I sing is a struggle comparable to the life of a spiritual athlete. After some years in the effort, one has a pretty good conception of form as it inheres in the art. You work for the rest of your life trying to attain an existential rendering of it. The limitations of the "flesh" are apparent every day, but it is, indisputably, the flesh that makes singing what it is.
A woman with whom I sang for a while many years ago pointed out to me that in the Bible only human beings sing. Look again at the passages you might recall that seem otherwise; I think you'll find that angels come praising God and "saying... ", not singing... . Being told by well-meaning Christians that opera is "of the flesh" is painful and incredible, just as it is painful and repellent to witness the death of Thais and the despair of the man who converts her to an erroneous theology by which he himself is undone. I think this is where Dave and I find common ground. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, or their latest incarnations, have gotten part of it right in rebelling against the doctrinaire and simplistic theology of the apparent antinomy.
But on this matter of noble and inherent form, inseparable from the body as God has created it, classical art has discovered a dimension of reality that needs to be cherished and preserved against the five-minutes-of-fame phenomena who have captivated and corrupted several generations of enthusiasts and who are now ascendant in the Evangelical church. There are black singers whose spirituals and gospel music have, by whatever means, attained the nobility of form inherent in the human body and, inspired by God's grace, they are able to demonstrate it for anyone with ears to hear, but even this music comes out of a tradition that winnows out the chaff over many generations.
Yes, the corruptible body and the spiritual body are in conflict. Another perplexing passage actually has the reverse meaning from that which is usually imposed on it. Let a man take care how he builds, for the day will test everything with fire... wood, hay, stubble will be burned, but the more enduring metals and precious stones will survive. That which survives is more durable material than the stuff that burns away, not some disembodied spirit. The metaphor can be construed without too much imagination to mean the enduring form that we can discover and embody in art, especially when it is art that is embodied in our own flesh, will survive. That's why great singing verges on transcendence in the world we know. That's what we mean when we say we are transported by great art. I've experienced this in the opera house and in church, in Mozart's music as well as that of a black soprano named Willow Dorsey singing her own rendition of Oh How I Love Jesus. I tell you the truth; she opened heaven for a while when her voice cut my heart like lightning. I shouted like one of the fat women waving their handkerchiefs.
Mike wrote: "I've experienced this in the opera house and in church, in Mozart's music as well as that of a black soprano named Willow Dorsey singing her own rendition of Oh How I Love Jesus. I tell you the truth; she opened heaven for a while when her voice cut my heart like lightning. I shouted like one of the fat women waving their handkerchiefs."
I love this description, Mike. I probably wouldn't have ever had the notion to recover an incarnational view of rock had the music of Bill Mallonee and Mark Heard not cut me to the quick. Here was a contradiction that I could not reconcile: that the most despised, profligate form of music in the world convicted me and confronted me with the person of Christ with a force I hadn't known before. "Parting Shot" is as good an example as any. You have to hear it for the full effect but the lyrics stand up pretty well: http://www.parting-shot.com/music.php?rid=98
And this by Mark Heard...simply devastating: http://mhlp.rru.com/lonely_road.htm
Hey Ray,
This is frickin' awesome. It never occurred to me before to click on your link. I didn't know you had this blog. As soon as I get a chance, I'm going to lose myself in this thing for a while. I'm sorry I haven't before!
Here's a site with plenty of downloads of Orthodox liturgical music.
http://stjrussianorthodox.com/music.htm
A quote regarding the monastic call from St. Gregory the Theologian:
"Will you prefer action or contemplation?
Contemplation is the occupation of the perfect,
Action belongs to the many.
Both are good and dear;
Choose the one that befits you."
An explanation of the Orthodox monastic ideal by Fr. Georges Florovsky which also discusses the Reformation views:
http://www.holytrinitymission.org/books/english/fathers_florovsky_4.htm#_Toc27729593
Chares--
Please enlarge a bit more on this statement you made:
"
In 1 Cor 15:44 Paul apparently opposes the physical body and the spiritual body. In fact a better translation of the Greek is “psychical” not physical. We should understand the opposition to be between the corruptible body and the spiritual body. This frees us to understand spirit differently and more in light of Gen 1:2, where the Spirit (big “S”) is in “real” and full contact with the heavens and the earth. Spirit is perfective of the entire man, both body and soul, though I generally think that Christians struggle with the thought that salvation and beatitude must necessarily mean that their bodies are going to be sublimed away. Having said all this, do both of you think this line of thought can be propaedeutic to advancing a non-dualistic anthropology (and aesthetic of music)? "
If I read you correctly, you believe that the dualist point of view really doesn't exist in Scripture--that is has been a misinterpretation--and we should get beyond that question and focus on "the Spirit being perfective of the entire man, body and soul". I think most of us here are trying to eschew the dualist teachings we have received and proceed toward this. Towards this end, can you offer a picture of what the aesthetic of "the Spirit being perfective of the entire man" should look like or sound like in our arts?
I read the lyrics, Dave. Whatever the music sounds like, the impact is the scandal of the Gospel, the Son of God, who is also the son of man, engaging the world in every cultural ghetto, high or low. I think we've come to agree that spirit/body dualism is inadequate. I've posted a quote from an Orthodox theologian to begin a new thread that should keep us busy for quite a while.
Chares--
Are you saying that we can, with a theological sleight of hand defend our tastes in music--even those musical forms that has seduced our passions?
Ray and I were emailing each other privately about the morality of music just now--so I will copy here my observation about it to him which adds some proof to what you have said. I have a question for you at the end of this posting:
"I do think music, being a dynamic human creation as opposed to an inert physical object, does have an intrinsic moral dimension to it. Anything that has to do with language (including music which forms the background for language, the force with which God created the universe) has a tremendous moral dimension.
"But what kind of moral comes from our music does come down to a matter of choice. For instance, Frank Sinatra's version of "I Did It My Way" sounds mildly melodramatic, but overall very benign, almost boring, in delivery. The words, though, had a rather selfish edge to it, but you couldn't heard its innate selfishness in Sinatra's rendition. However, when Sid Viscious of the Sex Pistols did it, he took "I Did It My Way" to its ultimate narcisstic max and it was the most harrowingly demonic performance I'd ever heard."
Ray replied: "The composer is using the elements of music to convey a message. You may be able to throw some obscene words at me in Russian (my mother knew some in German) and they would have no meaning to me since I have no understanding of that language. The 26 letters of our alphabet are amoral, but arrange certain letters into 4 letter combinations and you have very specific meaning that I would understand. The text of "I Did It My Way" has a man-centered egocentric meaning to it. Sinatra's performance version took off the edges and made it acceptable in polite society. You could say, that the tone of his music did not match the tone of the text. Vicious's version was more honest in that the emotional tone of the music supported the text more clearly. With rock music, there's nothing wrong with the melody, harmony or even rhythm for that matter. Rock pieces have been transformed into something that sounds like it came from the pen of Bach, or maybe Mendelssohn. How it is performed or the context is what can make it have a good or evil intent. Your observations that rock has a base appeal is correct, and that is where the morality comes in."
Chares--what music do you think does not merely hypnotize our passions, and what kind leads us to perfection?
Let's hear it for John Phillip Sousa! As a trombonist you must have an aesthetic of marches, don't you, Ray? I've always loved this stuff.
Sorry Ray, I hope I didn't overstep, but what you had to say was good.
Is it ok if I like Sousa? I think he's an American Verdi.
Interesting that contemporary then meant flag-waving parades and how the parades turned to protest marches under the influence of our contemporary music.
I see that I'm probably responsible for this. It is Chares, not Charles. Sorry Charley.
Dave, I think you're saying that "dissing" a whole genre is probably wrong. It's like Scribe's example of Frank Sinatra's rendition of "My Way" and "My Way" by Sid Viscious.
And, now that you've brought up the effect of pop music on kids, we've got another problem. Parents can't spend a lot of time listening to kid's music while they are earning enough money to pay for their offspring's education. Do they really want to leave acculturation of the youth to the promoters who sell this stuff on the basis of raw appeal?
I don't have children, so I'll take your word that parental guidance is feasible. I'm going by my own experience of youthful acculturation in pop music, which turned my head various ways. The sex in rock music was one thing, but what did the most damage was the folksy stuff that made me idolize the winsome rover who worked in the fields and factories only long enough to draw his pay and then move on to the next town. That work ethic, or its absence, probably set me back ten years and is part of the reason I wasn't stable enough soon enough to have my own children.
When I discovered classical music I had other problems, but, at least, I had something to motivate me.
I'd say your boy is going to be susceptible to musical mythology. I can't remember all the artists now who turned my head; many of them working the same theme. I think Jimmy Rogers sang the song I had in mind. My mother bought the album, and I just overheard it. He sang other songs about faith and family life in the country, but the one I learned to play on the harmonica was that song about working the factories and plowing the fields. "The moonlight is my mother/ The sun is my old man/ My brothers and my sisters are the shifting wispering sand." I was good at a lot of things, but while this myth went round in my head I wasn't going accomplish anything.
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