Music and Faith

Finding Faith ~ Liturgical Music

 

A woman aged in her fifties who is a successful architect meets a man of her age during intermission at a production of the opera Thaïs, by Massenet.  The man is a lapsed monk of the Benedictine order who has education in philosophy and theology.  Stimulating conversations follow, more music, and eventually romance.  She is suffering from heart disease.  They go to church and discover a world that still thrives amid postmodern cultural decay. 

Michael Dodaro is published in First Things Journal of Religion in Public Life, The New Oxford Review, and extensively online.  He has written documentation for software developers for more than twenty years.  This musical novella is his most recent fiction title.  He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, soprano Diane Althaus.  Both are musicians with operatic credits and decades singing liturgical music. 

Recently published and available on Amazon at the price of a cup of coffee: A Woman of Transcendental Means: Finding Faith through Music and the Church Coffee Hour - Kindle edition by Dodaro, Michael. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

All Souls Requiem

 Great choral music and hymnody in Seattle:  

Or any Sunday: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjHAYVKoAZJxkvi6hSe-7jw/streams 

The Road to Damascus

Easter Sunday is a new beginning for everyone who has been paying attention. For the historic church, it was literally the beginning of an evangelistic outreach that transformed the Roman Empire and the world. The book of Acts is about conversion.

A central figure in the Book of Acts is Paul the apostle, who was known as Saul of Tarsus while he was still an enemy of the church.  How did Saul, an ethnocentric partisan who was complicit in the stoning of Stephen, become St. Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, and the author of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians with its 13th chapter about love, the greatest of virtues?  Who or what brought about this amazing transformation?

What kind of man was Saul?  We know he was well educated, a Pharisee, the disciple of Gamaliel, who in the book of the Acts, is a prominent member of the highest tribunal of the Jewish Sanhedrin. Gamaliel is represented in Acts 5:34, advising his fellow-members of the Sanhedrin not to put to death Peter and the Apostles, who had continued to preach despite warnings against it. Gamaliel’s advice, however unwelcome, was acted upon, because of his authority with his contemporaries.

Saul of Tarsus wasn’t as tolerant as his distinguished teacher.   He assented to the stoning of Stephen, and he was on his way to Damascus to bring back Christians in chains to be prosecuted in Jerusalem. I think we all have known some religious people who are committed and fervent but hard edged in their zeal or plain mean. Saul, we would have to admit, was a fanatical advocate for the ideology of his party, the Pharisees.  Were he living in our time, what would be his equivalent persona? He was respectable but dangerous, a scholar and tradesman--he earned his own living.  He is willing to use force to crush the new sect growing within the mainstream of his loyalties. He is not wealthy, but he is influential.  I’ve been trying to find an equivalent persona.  Something to think about.

There are persecutors of the church in North Korea and the Middle East.  But, Saul’s equivalent is any advocate who solidifies loyalty within his faction by targeting for destruction those who deviate from the ideology or faith.  We are surrounded by advocacy of this kind in politics, business, and religion.  Think of our national elections.  Most of the advertising is negative and stigmatizes those of the opposing party.  It is politics of fear-mongering and moralistic criticism.  Those in the opposing factions are not only wrong but evil.  Name your poison.  The church has it with a vengeance.  Schism and lawsuits transform assemblies of bishops into verbal brawls, scapegoating, and fear mongering about the evil liberals or the evil conservatives, one or the other of which is about to bring down the house.

Or, maybe Saul would be a power brokering manager in a corporation.  Networking is the same in business as it is in politics. The way it is used is different in degree, but not in kind, from that of Saul of Tarsus in his attempted purge.  Solidify the network by scapegoating individuals or factions.  Now that he is dead, we like to idolize Steve Jobs, but his employees were afraid to meet him in the hallways. If he didn’t like the way you looked at him, he would fire you on the spot.  It is a technique that resembles that of Joe Stalin, who occasionally had somebody taken out and shot to keep everybody else in line. Forbes Magazine recently had article on psychopathology among upper management that cites a study comparing the percentage of psychopaths in upper management to that of the prison population.

If you want the whole story on this syndrome, read Violence and the Sacred, by René Girard.  The frightening thing about this kind of religion or ideology is that it works, at least for a while.  Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia are conspicuous examples.  Loyalty is solidified by demonizing “Jews” or “capitalists”.  People are afraid, angry, grasping at things that don’t calm their anxieties. Finding somebody to blame suppresses conflict within the ranks.

So what is the antidote to this kind of power networking?  The drama of the Gospel narratives!  Power mongering and advocacy justify the community of the faithful against the factions subverting everything worthy of loyalty.  But, in the Gospels the community is guilty.  The scapegoat, Jesus, is innocent, and his followers are innocent.  The religious motif of the Gospels turns paganism and tribalism, of the ancient or modern version, upside down.  If the Pharisees and the Sadducees are guilty of conspiring, even with Romans, to crucify an innocent man, the victim starts to be seen in the tradition of the prophets and patriarchs who suffered for their faith and testimony.  The mechanism of maintaining solidarity by character assassination of opponents, or literal assassination, is undone.  It has taken centuries for this truth to gain credibility in Western culture. The church, whenever it gets power, has to continually relearn that victimizing the opposition makes the community into an oppressor instead of a liberator.

Saul of Tarsus learned this truth in a matter of days after his Road-to-Damascus encounter with Jesus whom he persecuted in his attacks on Jesus’ followers.  Saul the fanatic was converted.  He became an apostle of the love of God incarnate in Jesus and in the new Christians.  The same man who stood by at the stoning of Stephen wrote the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians and the letter to Philemon, a letter that is a plea to the master of a runaway slave for clemency and acceptance of a brother in Christ.

The book of The Acts of the Apostles includes quite a number of dramatic transformations of ordinary people into saints.  Most of us, fortunately, don’t have to learn the way of the Gospels through a conversion like that of Saul of Tarsus.  In my case overzealous commitment has not been the problem.   Quite the contrary, I have had trouble going full speed into any activity.  I came of age in the 1960s.  If you are old enough to remember that decade, you probably remember that a lot of us thought we would never grow old.  The world was on the verge of a nuclear holocaust, or if that was somehow averted, we would likely pollute or overpopulate the world and die in some Malthusian catastrophe.  For me, sometime between junior high school and college, this fear mongering—remember the people writing this stuff had to sell their books—kept me from a single minded trajectory toward any legitimate goal.  I took refuge in the church. It verges on bad faith when one uses an apocalyptic view of life in this world to evade decisions or commitment.

 In absence of strong ambitions there was time available for outdoorsy sports like skiing and mountain climbing.  In college the absence of goals left me free to learn a lot of things that formerly I didn’t know existed.  I took year-long sequence courses in English literature and philosophy.  I had learned to sing in church, so getting into the college choir wasn’t so difficult.  The choir sang Bach, Handel, and Mozart.  I was hooked.  I found out in a strange way that he who loses his life will find it in new options that appear when the normal ambitions go away.

 I was left with a bunch of passionate interests, none of which were very practical.  I found out that I could write.  All the books I was reading had an effect.  I thought being a writer would be nice, somewhere in the mountains with my books and recordings.  That pipe dream dissipated with the various jobs I had to find to pay the bills.  A lot of years and a failed marriage proved that in spite of nuclear bombs, the population explosion, and a growing hole in the ozone, that I was going to have to work for a living just like my father.  I kept writing and singing, mostly for the fun of it.  Eventually my new wife taught me how to use a computer.  She then had a real job.

I found that I liked programming, and I read George Gilder, who said that pretty soon—this was the mid 1990s—that anybody would be able to publish anything without sending manuscripts to New York, mainly for rejection slips.  Gilder is optimistic about technology.  You can read him to dispel a lot of fear mongering by people who have to get grants to sustain their research.  I learned to program computers.   Microsoft was hiring anybody who could program and speak English.  I worked as a tester, and my English is pretty good, so I became a programming writer.

But we're looking for Road-to-Damacus experience.  I’ve had a number of them, not very dramatic, but interesting.  Ten years ago I read an advertisement that claimed copy writers could make big money writing advertising.  It must have been the old hankering for time to write like Hemingway in the Sun Valley Lodge that got me to order the correspondence course on copy writing.  I’d find out how to work twenty hours a week and then pursue my real passions.

The course arrived, and when I opened the first book, I found the answer to a question that had been plaguing me since high school.  Why are there always so many prophets of doom?  I opened the first book and read the secret of selling just about anything: If you want to motivate people to act, you have to appeal to very basic human emotions.  Logical arguments, no matter how flawless, will not get people off the dime.  You have to appeal to basic emotions.  The most dependable are fear and greed.  Suddenly the sky opened before me and I understood everything.   I knew very well the desperation of the writer to publish and sell articles, books, and documentaries.  Academics have to sell their books.  Their careers depend on it.  Why do we have one crisis after another?  Think about the people who write the news, whose careers depend on being read.  Think about the academics whose careers are based on the dictum “publish or perish”.   Greed is easy.  How much junk mail do you get every month that is written on some variation of the theme? How you can profit from the coming Financial Holocaust.   The energy crisis is over, but now we have global warming and GMO food.  Maybe one of these will kill me, but for now I’m going to keep my job.  I can make music with the choir.  If the end does come, I’ll be singing in a better choir anyway.

Populism in the Evangelical ethos

The issue of populism in the Evangelical ethos raises a concern for the need to differentiate between pop culture as folk culture and pop culture as mass culture. At its best, Evangelicalism seeks to preserve and foster folk culture, and the critics of Evangelical piety need to recognize this strength, because it is through the ongoing propagation of folk culture that the disenchanting effects of modernity will be overcome ultimately. I say this knowing full well that the strong temptation within Evangelicalism is to traffic in the forms of mass culture, and it has succumbed to that temptation on more than one occasion.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/02/evangelicals-pop-culture-and-mass-culture

N. T. Wright; The Case for the Psalms

A welcome thesis and book by N. T. Wright.

From the book description:
Reading, studying, and praying the Psalms is God's means for teaching us what it means to be human: how to express our emotions and yearnings, how to reconcile our anger and our compassion, how to see our story in light of God's sweeping narrative of salvation. Wright provides the tools for understanding and incorporating these crucial verses into our own lives. His conclusion is simple: all Christians need to read, pray, sing, and live the Psalms.

http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780062230508

Ignatius on Not Being Shaped by the Prevailing Culture

"Our task is not one of producing persuasive propaganda: Christianity shows its greatness when it is hated by the world."

-- St. Ignatius of Antioch, in Letter to the Romans

Richard Neuhaus on Andrew Greeley

Being a Catholic, says Greeley, is a matter of what one believes, in the sense of doctrines affirmed. But it is more importantly a matter of the sacred stories told in community. “None of the doctrines is less true than the stories. Indeed, they have the merit of being more precise, more carefully thought out, more ready for defense and explanation. But they are not where religion or religious faith starts, nor in truth where it ends.” The experienced Catholic reality is communal stories, rituals, and cultivated sensibilities that engage ultimate truths.

By way of contrast, Greeley contends, Protestantism and a culture formed by Protestantism tend toward a “dialectical imagination.” The dialectical imagination is analytical and distrustful of analogy, metaphor, and poetry. Between the natural and supernatural, the ultimate and the penultimate, the heavenly and earthly, Protestantism accents dissimilarities and “otherness,” while Catholicism generously, even promiscuously, embraces the similarities. “Catholicism is a verdant rainforest of metaphors. The Protestant imagination distrusts metaphors; it tends to be a desert of metaphors. Catholicism stresses the ‘like’ of any comparison (human passion is like divine passion), while Protestantism, when it is willing to use metaphors (and it must if it is to talk about God at all), stresses the unlike.”

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/05/30/neuhaus-on-fr-andrew-greeley/ 

Neighbors are tired of loud rock music at Community Church

Neighbors are tired of loud rock music at Gold Creek Community Church services but feel powerless to get anyone to do anything about it. One church member is the Snohomish County sheriff.

I haven't had to contend with pop music in church lately, but this could get me riled again: Noisy Church

The Mill Creek-area church has no conventional religious trappings — crosses and altars — and music is the main part of the worship experience. It attracts young people traditional churches don't, say the pastors. "Music is a powerful medium," Pastor Larry Ehoff, the worship director, told the congregation on Sunday.
The church is a brown multibuilding complex in the middle of a large parking lot ringed by trim suburban homes, many bearing red signs admonishing the church members for "not respecting their neighbors."

Chant and Sacred Music

It isn't only revolutions in technology that begin in the garage these days. Here's a blueprint for restoration of Gregorian Chant in Catholic Parishes around the country.
How to Start Your Own Garage Schola

CCM Survivor

I began a correspondence last week with Lori Lewis who was involved the CCM business for years and lived to tell about it. This link tells the tale:

No Place Like Home

Rational Theology versus Enthusiasm

A new book by Rodney Stark delineates the progress in Western Civilization that originated in the rational theology of the church:

The Victory of Reason : How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success

There is a long history of dispute between those inclined to enthusiasm and proponents of a more reasoned faith. Current trends in church music are in some ways similar to the era of American revivalism. Pietism has a respectable history, but combined with postmodern cultural premises, it is poses a threat to rational theology.

The following review provides an introduction to Stark's book:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/25/RVGDDG9CUE1.DTL

Musica Sacra Journal

The new edition of Sacred Music Journal is available for download. This issue is entitled A New Beginning for Sacred Music.
The complete issue is available here: http://www.musicasacra.com/

Chanting the Psalms

Here is a fascinating quote from Fr. Joseph Fessio: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0540.html

Now, just a little footnote on the Gregorian Chant. In reflecting on these things about Church music, I began to think about the Psalms a few years back. And a very obvious idea suddenly struck me. Why it didn’t come earlier I don’t know, but the fact is that the Psalms are songs. Every one of the 150 Psalms is meant to be sung; and was sung by the Jews. When this thought came to me, I immediately called a friend, a rabbi in San Francisco who runs the Hebrew School, and I asked“Do you sing the Psalms at your synagogue?” “Well, no, we recite them,” he said. “Do you know what they sounded like when they were sung in the Old Testament times and the time of Jesus and the Apostles?” I asked. He said, “No, but why don’t you call this company in Upstate New York. They publish Hebrew music, and they may know.”
So, I called the company and they said, “We don’t know; call 1-800-JUDAISM.” So I did. And I got an information center for Jewish traditions, and they didn’t know either. But they said, “You call this music teacher in Manhattan. He will know.” So, I called this wonderful rabbi in Manhattan and we had a long conversation. At the end, I said, “I want to bring some focus to this, can you give me any idea what it sounded like when Jesus and his Apostles sang the Psalms?” He said, “Of course, Father. It sounded like Gregorian Chant. You got it from us.”
I was amazed. I called Professor William Mahrt, a Professor of Music at Stanford University and a friend. I said, “Bill, is this true?” He said, “Yes. The Psalm tones have their roots in ancient Jewish hymnody and psalmody.” So, you know something? If you sing the Psalms at Mass with the Gregorian tones, you are as close as you can get to praying with Jesus and Mary. They sang the Psalms in tones that have come down to us today in Gregorian Chant.

Aboriginal Christianity

No matter how you analyze worship, the requirements include spiritual involvement and truth, in which understanding is implicit. Involvement in the historic tradition aids both transcendence of the present era and an understanding of doctrines that are based on events in time. To worship is to act out our faith in continuity with a tradition that connects us to the apostles and what they witnessed in the presence of Jesus. Old liturgical forms and music embody the continuity of the church triumphant in the presence of the church militant. And the historic liturgical music of the church is still the most universally understood.

Another interesting thing is how the church occupied and transformed the pagan temples and basilicas of the Roman Empire. One way to understand this is to see it as Christianity infusing more complete meaning into forms that were ancient and beautiful. All beauty is God’s beauty.

Now, apparently, the most moving experiences for many people are rock concerts. There are probably ways that the excitement of these experiences can be salvaged. A lot of good people seem to think so. But it is important to claim the noblest art forms in our culture. These things have been created over many generations.

There is a great old book called "Christianity Rediscovered" by Vincent Donovan that describes seventeen years of mission work in Tanzania. Translation of parables and stories from the Bible into the cultural imagery of indigenous people involved many features of the indigenous culture adapted to communicate Christian doctrine and character ideals to new converts. The difficulty was conveying the original meaning in the forms available in the language and imagery of the people.

Now, advocates of postmodern literary theory argue that there is no authoritative meaning in works of literature and all literature is merely rhetoric in a class struggle. In the church we hear different forms of this argument depending on whether one is involved in a liberal or a conservative church. In liberal churches, it seems the Bible is like any other book and its truths are thought to be culturally relative. In Evangelical churches it is claimed that the gospel must be contextualized to contemporary modes of expression and that artistic form is neutral. Rock music has been in vogue for thirty years, so rock music seems to be the way to communicate the gospel.

The problems of the liberal approach are evident; without moral absolutes, atonement for sin and salvation are nonsense. But there is also a problem communicating the historic tradition of the apostles in art that has no more history than McDonald’s fast-food. The meaning of the gospel is inextricable from the historic church, which is the spiritual body of believers in its teachings and, even more importantly, its witness to the Incarnation and resurrection of Jesus. If the apostles had not succeeded in establishing the church, there would be no Bible, and Christianity would be like the religions of ancient Egypt, unknowable except through the artifacts of archeology.

There have been numerous denominations and movements that have tried to get back to original Christianity without the liturgies and organizational frameworks that are connected to the apostolic tradition. Protestant traditions have emphasized the priesthood of all believers and the doctrine called sola scriptura. But as these movements try to extract the pure gospel out of its cultural and historic embodiment, it is more difficult to recognize Christian worship as distinctly Christian. The time interval from fresh upstart movement to oddball sect is usually only a couple of generations. Already we have grey whiskered rock musicians acting like they were nineteen in nostalgia fests among devotees.

The revival era adapted modes of expression in its hymnody that sounded like Victorian era parlor music. CCM churches are rebelling against these old forms to create their equivalent in currently popular music. This seems reasonable enough until you contrast Victorian culture with the libertinism of post 1960s pop culture. In this framework, it’s hard to accept the arguments we hear all the time about cultural forms being neutral—you know, “Arguing over music is like arguing about the color of the carpet.” It’s even more incredible when youths with green hair and nose rings are singing about Jesus. No missioner in Tanzania would dress and dance like an aboriginal Tanzanian to attract a crowd, but postmod Americans are now doing roughly the same thing under the spotlights of mega-church auditoriums.

Beyond Church as Lecture Hall or Rock Concert

I found an interesting discussion this morning on a blog run by Christianity Today Leadership Journal: Beyond Sermons and Songs
This is the second of the set that begins here: Beyond Sermons and Songs part 1

And another blog that I have yet to explore: http://thegreatgiveaway.blogspot.com/

Looks like some good reading and there are lots of comments.

And this: Anglican Mission in America

Karl Barth's Letter of Thanks to Mozart

My dear Conductor and Court Composer:
Someone got the curious idea of inviting me and a few others to write a "letter of thanks to Mozart" for his newspaper. At first I shook my head and even looked at the wastebasket. But if there is anything which has to do with you, I can say "No" only in the rarest cases. And did you not also write more than one somewhat funny letter during your lifetime? So, why not? They certainly know more there where you dwell now, unimpeded by time and space, about each other and about us than do we ourselves down here. Thus I actually do not doubt that you have known for a long time how grateful I have been to you almost all my life and always will remain. Nevertheless why shouldn't you read this in black and white?

Two excuses have to be made first. Number one: I am one of those Protestants of whom you are supposed to have said once that we were unable to understand properly the meaning of Agnus Dei, qui talus peccata mundi. Pardon me, probably you are now better informed on that. However, I do not want to bother you with theology. Believe it or not, I actually dreamed of you last week. Here is the dream: I had to examine you (why, I don't even understand, myself). I knew that under no circumstances would you be allowed to fail the examination. I asked you about the meaning of "dogmatics" and "dogma," by pointing in the most friendly way to your Masses, which I like especially. But to my great regret I got not the least answer from you!! Don't you think we'd better give this point a blessed rest?

The second excuse is far more complicated. I have learned that you could enjoy only the praise of connoisseurs, even in your childhood. As you know, there are not only musicians but also musicologists on this earth. You yourself were both. I am neither the one nor the other. I play no instrument nor do I have the faintest idea about the theory of harmony, let alone the mysteries of "counterpoint." Those very musicologists disturbed me deeply whose books I tried to decipher when I drew up an address for the recent celebration of your two hundredth birthday. By the way, I cannot help thinking that if I were young and had to start this kind of studying I would clash with a few of your most outstanding theoretical interpreters in the same way that I did with my theological masters forty years ago. But be that as it may, how can I, under these circumstances, thank you as a connoisseur? In other words, how can I make you happy?

To my relief, I have also read that you sometimes made music for hours and hours for very lowly people. This you did only because you somehow had the feeling that they were pleased to listen to you. In this way, with a repeatedly delighted ear and heart I have heard and still hear you play. I myself am so utterly naive that I cannot tell in which of the thirty-four periods of your life, according to the classification of Wyzewa and Saint-Foix, you are nearest to my heart. Surely, surely, you began to become really great, let's say, about 1785. But I hope I won't hurt your feelings (or will I?) in confessing the following: It has been and always will be impossible for me to listen without deep emotion not only to Don Giovanni and to your last symphonies, to the Magic Flute and the Requiem but no less to the "Hafiner" Serenade and the Eleventh Divertimento, etc. Actually, I am deeply moved even by Bastien and Bastienne! Consequently, you are interesting and dear to me much earlier than the moment when you can be praised as the "pioneer" of Beethoven!

What I owe you, frankly, is this: whenever I listen to your music I feel led to the threshold of a world which is good and well ordered, in sunshine and thunderstorm, by day and by night. Thus you have repeatedly given me, a human being of the twentieth century, courage (not haughtiness!), tempo (not exaggerated tempo!), purity (not boring purity!) and peace (not complacent peace !). If he really digests your musical dialectics he can be young and become old, he can work and relax, he can be happy and depressed; in short, he can live. You know now, far better than I, that much more is necessary for that purpose than the very best music. But there is music which helps men to this end (ex post and only incidentally!) and other music which cannot help toward it. Your music helps. This I have experienced all my life (I am going to be seventy years old and if you were living you would dwell in our midst as a patriarch of two hundred years!). Moreover, I am convinced that our century, which is becoming more and more obscure, especially needs your help. For both these reasons I am grateful to you that you have lived, that you wanted to make and did make pure music in the few decades of your life, and that you still live in your music. Please believe me that many, many ears and hearts, scholarly and unscholarly, just as my own, still like to hear you for ever and ever - not only in the year of your jubilee.

I have only a hazy feeling about the music played there where you now dwell. I once formulated my surmise about that as follows: whether the angels play only Bach in praising God I am not quite sure; I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart and that then also God the Lord is especially delighted to listen to them. Well, this alternative may be wrong. Besides, you know that better than I do, anyhow. I mention this only in order to hint metaphorically at my meaning.
And so, with all my heart,
yours,
KARL BARTH

From Barth's Mozart Festival Address, "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart."
In other words, Mozart's Figaro has nothing to do with the ideas of the French Revolution and Don Giovanni has nothing to do with the myth of the eternal libertine (as Kierkegaard asserted!). Certainly there does not exist a special Mozartian "philosophy of Cosi fan tutte" either, and one should not read too much "humanity-religion" and/or political mysteries into Mozart's Magic Flute. The fact is that, whether we like it or not (and it can be seen in his letters), neither the nature surrounding him nor the history, literature, philosophy or politics of his time touched him directly or in a concrete sense. Nor was he moved to represent or proclaim any decisions or dogmas. It is to be feared that he never read much, and he certainly never speculated or taught. There is no Mozartian metaphysics either. He sought and found only his musical possibilities, themes and tasks in the world of nature and spirit. With God, the world, men, himself, heaven and earth, life - and, above all, death - before his eyes, in his ears and in his heart he was an unproblematic person. For that reason he was a free man, in a way which was apparently allowed, ordered and therefore exemplary for him.

This involves the fact that his music was uniquely free from every exaggeration, basic friction and contradiction. The sun shines but does not dazzle the eyes, nor demolish nor scorch. Heaven arches above the earth but does not press upon or crush and swallow it. And so earth remains earth, but without being forced to hold its own against heaven in titanic revolt. In the same way darkness, chaos, death and hell render themselves conspicuous but are not allowed to prevail even for a moment. Mozart makes music, knowing everything from a mysterious center, and thus he knows and keeps the boundaries on the right and on the left, upward and downward. He observes moderation. Again he wrote, in 1781, that "the emotions, strong or not, never should be expressed ad nauseam and that music, even in the most horrible situation, never must offend the ears but must please them nevertheless. In other words, music must always remain music." He was (and I quote Grillparzer's beautiful words) the musician "who never did too little, and never did too much, and who always arrived at but never went beyond his goal."

There is no light which does not know the darkness too, no happiness which does not include sorrow; but also inversely, no alarm, no ire, no wailing to the aid of which peace would not come, from near or far. There is no laughter, therefore, without weeping, but no weeping without laughter either. There never was a Mozart of such utter gracefulness that the nineteenth century, after praising him, could grow justly tired of him. But neither did there exist this "demoniac Mozart" whom our century wanted to substitute. The very absence of all demons, the very stopping before the extreme, and precisely the wise confrontation and mixture of the elements (let us say it again) amounts to the freedom in which the true vox humana speaks in Mozart's music. In it the entire scale is unmuffled, but at the same time undistorted and uncramped. Whoever correctly hears him, may, as the human being he really is, feel himself understood and called to freedom: as the clever Basilio, the affectionate Cherubino, as Don Giovanni, the hero, or as the coward Leporello, as the gentle Pamina or the raging Queen of the Night, as the all-forgiving Countess, the terribly jealous Electra, the wise Sarastro and the foolish Papageno all of whom lie hidden in us. Or we may think, as all of us do, of ourselves as persons destined for death, who yet live on and on.

Something at the last, however, must be perceived and mentioned. Mozart's center is not like that of the great theologian Schleiermacher, identical with balance, neutralization and finally indifference. What happened in this center is rather a splendid annulment of balance, a turn in the strength of which the light rises and the shadow winks but does not disappear; happiness outdistances sorrow without extinguishing it and the "Yes" rings stronger than the still-existing "No." Notice the reversal of the great dark and the little bright experiences in Mozart's life! "The rays of the sun disperse the night" - that's what you hear at the end of the Magic Flute. The play may or must still proceed or start from the very beginning. But it is a play which in some Height or Depth is winning or has already won. This directs and characterizes it. One will never perceive equilibrium, and for that reason uncertainty or doubt, in Mozart's music. This is true of his operas as well as of his instrumental music, and especially of his church music. Is not each Kyrie or Miserere, even if it begins at the lowest depth, carried by the trust that the prayer for grace has in fact been answered? Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini! In Mozart's version he has apparently already arrived. Dona nobis pacem! This prayer, too, has already been answered in Mozart's music, in spite of everything. For this very reason his church music has to be called truly spiritual music, in spite of all well-known objections. Mozart never lamented, never quarreled. He would have been entitled to do so. Instead, he always executed that comforting turn which is priceless for everyone who hears it. That seems to me, as far as it can be explained at all, to be the secret of his freedom and thereby the nucleus of his singular quality, for which we asked at the beginning.

I leave one question unanswered: How is it possible that I, an evangelical Christian and theologian, can so proclaim Mozart? How could I do this even though he was such a Catholic and even a Freemason and besides through and through nothing else than just a musician? He who has ears to hear has certainly heard. May I ask all the others, who perhaps shake their heads in astonishment and alarm, to be momentarily contented with the general reference to the fact that the New Testament speaks not only about the kingdom of heaven, but also of the parables of the kingdom of heaven?

An Incarnational Theology of Aesthetics

Racehorses and Rattlesnakes

Any good musical performance can make us listen more intently. When Placido Domingo sings—or Bob Dylan—the mind stops wasting time. We listen. Something about what they do concentrates awareness. This is a difficult state to attain in the multitasking environment in which we daily grind out our lives. Domingo and Dylan are almost always interesting. Domingo’s voice is a racehorse, and Dylan’s is a mule, but both carry us to places we might never visit except on their backs. A racehorse is thrilling on the track; a mule is perhaps the only way if we're descending a trail from the rim of the Grand Canyon to the river in the abyss. Both the exhilaration of musical virtuosity and plodding exploration of rattlesnake-infested canyons have their place in art. The world’s body is an instrument of the sublime as well as a treacherous viper. I’ve stolen a metaphor from John Crowe Ransom, who, in his critical masterpiece entitled The World’s Body, explained some of the techniques used in poetry to prod sensory indolence toward spiritual alertness. Ransom, to my recollection, tried to explain how philosophers and literary critics are different from artists, though he understood that some artists are also critics and was himself a poet as well as a teacher. In terms of this metaphor, art is embodiment. It tends to focus the mind on the particular and unique in human experience rather than abstract principles used to control things as in science or business. If there is meaning in a poem, it can never be adequately paraphrased in philosophical terminology.

T. S. Eliot, perhaps the greatest poet and critic of the twentieth century, had a more abstract expression for the imagery of a poem; he described art as an objective correlative, an objective correlative that corresponds to and evokes an emotional state. This is a remarkable expression coming from one of the most intellectual of English poets. If the meaning of a poem cannot be paraphrased, should we expect to find in philosophy, or theology, aesthetic principles that adequately describe what art in its various mediums communicates or some ideal toward which it aspires? Plato and Aristotle had much to say about art based on the formal order they understood to be irreducible and more real than the existing world. In their terms, art, in the purest sense, is about beauty or the beautiful soul. For Aristotle, there is a correspondence between the universal and the concrete. If we begin with an examination of works that elicit something that seems describable in no other way than as art, abstract beauty isn’t the primary ingredient in art; too much art is repellent. Genet and others have argued that concentration on the vilest things will lead us to the same place as contemplation of virtue.

In order to get beyond art that I have experienced as only mediocre, it may be interesting to start with art that devours itself. I’ve written enough about my antipathy for rock music that I don’t have to restate reasons for thinking it is dangerous beyond the progressive deafness it inflicts on many of its practitioners and devotees. But sometimes art can mean precisely the opposite of what its creators intend. The shock troupes of popular culture sometimes make us aware of virtue by its absence. The shock troupes of serious culture affect a similar privation in their exceedingly pretentious barrage of disjointed painful illusions. Roger Kimball has aptly titled his book on the excrescences of modern and post-modern art, Experiments against Reality. All the sensory and intellectual machinery of this contrived chaos is marshaled against integration in the mind and spirit. Music in this anti-tradition is cacophonous and bizarre, organized arbitrarily on the premise that none of the principles of western standard practice are normative simply because they have been discovered through innumerable stages of development, or that they work. Ugliness, when taken seriously in the manner of this art, devours the nihilism of its nonsensical ideology, because music so repellent exposes a new criterion. At some point it becomes impossible to imagine anything more ludicrous. To parody Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God: art so puerile that nothing more ridiculous can be imagined establishes the existence of a standard by which it is recognized as absurd.

But let us leave serious contemporary art and get back to art with some semblance of meaning, say Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger. At full tilt they at least seem to be having a good time. Judging by the millions of recordings sold, those by Elvis for half a century, a lot of people seemed to be having a good time along with them. That’s indisputably not the case with most of the operas written during the later part of the twentieth century. The standard interpretation of the rock phenomenon has itself become part of the cultural landscape. Rock music is, in this reading, throwing off the inhibitions of American Puritanism. It has thus liberated several generations from the Calvinistic self-abnegation of their predecessors. Recalling that Calvin banished all music but plainsong chant from his churches makes it hard to deny that the current theory on the rock music phenomenon explains some dysfunction in the Calvinistic doctrine of human artistry, and even so venerable a theologian as Dietrich Bonhoeffer has only disparaging things to say about singers whose voices are audible above the congregation during hymn singing. Calvin may have been in reaction to what he perceived as indulgence in pagan sensuality in renaissance art to a degree that he thought even harmony was a kind of sensualism.

Calvin’s rationalism blows like a desiccating wind through Christendom, but he wasn’t wrong about everything. The balance of powers in American government can be seen as Puritan realism about human depravity. Freedom in the United States is partly a function of institutionalized doctrines that block predictable abuses of power. It’s also debatable whether the productivity of the American economy has been the result of freedom or a work ethic involving self-denial and anxiety about election that creates capital reserves. The generations of relatively free, wealthy Americans who have finally realized Calvin’s ideas are incomplete in certain applications, are about to find out whether unconstrained freedom or self-restraint count for more in economic terms. In certain applications, say the Salem witch trials, Calvinism may be as irrational as a rock concert, but, by a pendulum theory of art, we can imagine Calvin liberating Geneva from the idolatries of Michelangelo. Thankfully, the Catholic Church hasn’t seen fit to demolish, or otherwise dispose of, the treasures of the Vatican Palace. But, then again, the phrase “treasures of the Vatican Palace” does raise an incongruous clang in a sanctuary dedicated to Jesus as we find him in the Gospels.

To those with some education in the arts, it seems evident that Calvin and the iconoclasts went overboard while they were trying to stabilize the boat. The promoters staging multimedia productions in church would no doubt concur. That he may have missed the boat entirely, long before it ever got into dangerous water, does not change the fact that there is some dangerous art out there. Drugs and even rape are more common at and around rock concerts than is generally acknowledged. The facts tend to be submerged in the oceans of money flowing through city arenas where these circuses are mounted. Still, dangerous and intolerable may not always be the same thing when it comes to artistic freedom. Artistic freedom, of course, is not the question when government funding at art galleries sustains “works of art” like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ. But we’re trying to work with the idea that scandalous art is not inadmissible in a discussion of theology of aesthetics.

God created a world with hazardous places and creatures. We’ve already compared Bob Dylan’s singing to an excursion through the Grand Canyon on a mule. Only a hundred years ago the Hopi Indians in that locale were increasing the numinous excitement of their festivals by dancing with rattlesnakes in their mouths. Precisely where along the spine of a rattlesnake does one bite, without being bitten, in order to constrain a rattlesnake so that one can dance without having the excitement dampened suddenly by the impact of a head and fangs that will induce a sudden swelling about the neck? This question, though certainly germane, is apparently not the first question that anthropologists try to answer. The Hopi make beautiful pottery. The Audubon Society has noted that some factions ritualistically kill eagles. Now, under instruction in the current church-growth literature, mission engagement with the Hopi puts evangelists in something of a predicament. Will inscription of the four spiritual laws on pottery urns be sufficient acculturation in order to communicate in the cultural idioms of the Hopi? Or are we going to have to import snake handlers from Tennessee?

The disputed passage from the Gospel of Mark aside, Hopi dancers and Christian snake-handlers seem to hold, excuse the expression, similar, if elusive, versions of Durkheim's idea of numinous art. Britny Spears is known to have exploited this notion, having once danced naked, or nearly so, on national television while fondling a large, presumably non-venomous, snake. God created great whales, walruses, and small, but poisonous, rattlesnakes. He must think they are marvelous, for their own sake, or is it that the human race deserves to have them crawling around in the garden during dry years in sagebrush country? It is perhaps insensitive to propose that he created them in retribution for the art, which he knew through his divine foreknowledge, those created in his image would invent during the twentieth century.

There is yet quite a lot to be said about racehorses, but we can carefully lay aside the rattlesnakes, only noting that they are too beautiful, in a formal sense, to be the work of a blind watchmaker. God must be the artist who creates them, if only to prove the threatening hiss and buzz of his music is more exhilarating than the operas of Phillip Glass. A rattlesnake, even unperturbed on a rock, is more artful than the work called Satyagraha, a travesty by Glass on Gandhi. The only interesting parts of this music are stolen from an organ concerto by Felix Mendelssohn. The irony of Satyagraha is that the title translates as an insistence on truth that arms the votary with matchless power. God armed the rattlesnake with more truth and power than any number of contemporary composers.

If poetry is, as Ransom teaches, the world’s body, what are we to call art that embodies nobility, love, and treachery, in drama using the language of the greatest literary works in the Western canon set to music by composers skilled in a tradition that is the culmination of a thousand years of liturgical and theatrical practice and performed by singers whose voices have the stamina to soar for hours over a large orchestra? Throw in the occasional ballet, and you have the beginning of a description of opera. Olympic athletes train for, maybe, ten or fifteen years to reach the peak of their careers. Opera singers commonly sing for thirty or forty years, continually refining their technique in an art that is in many ways as strenuous as sport. Opera engages the senses and the spirit on so many dimensions that even those schooled in its conventions cannot simultaneously absorb all the impacts.

Enjoying opera takes preparation for most people. The language is exalted and often foreign in the locale of the performance. The metaphysical presuppositions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are uncongenial for audiences who don’t understand them and a constant challenge to the dispositions of the directors now staging historic operas who do understand and often try to undermine them. Yet beyond the pendulum theory of art, where the errors of metaphysics and ontology in the reasoning of earlier thinkers are corrected by new art, the standard repertoire of operatic masterpieces maintains an organic repository of magnificence. A positive theology of aesthetics can be delineated by following any of the contrapuntal voices in the operatic tradition.

Maybe we now agree that exhilaration and exploration are both part of the artistic experience. Like simpler art forms, opera illuminates being in vivid definition. Often enough, all the climbers in this expedition are able to ascend into the atmosphere of the sublime. The highest peaks then cut a jagged horizon out of the sky. Dealing with something that can be compared to a mountaineering expedition in the Himalayas, or launching the space shuttle, reduces the imagery of the racehorse to mere exercise. The equivalent of both the climbing expedition and engineering science, physical skill and technical mastery, are necessary to stage an opera. Composers, conductors, singers, orchestra players, designers, directors, and spear carriers all must do their work within a living organic tradition or fight against it.

Experiential appreciation of being is inescapable in opera. Love it or hate it, when the fat lady sings, you feel it. Sometimes the masterpiece being sung is beautiful beyond description in any another way. This is artistry on the highest plain. In other terminology, the resonances in the human spirit along so many dimensions can be called revelation, or an incarnation, or the word made flesh. This description, of course, grievously offends the sensibilities of post-modern literary theorists. Fortunately for them, many attempts are made to fabricate art on this level. When art is contrived to create the illusion of truth, there is harmony along some dimensions of our humanity and in some of the fibers in the fabric of the medium. If art of this kind convinces some people, for a while, that it is a metaphor of reality, or is at least persuasive, but it eventually does not ring true, the work that at first seemed a genuine work of art is revealed to be the contemptible artifice we call propaganda, or in its milder forms, mere rhetoric.

Genuine art is so illuminating, or arresting, or exultant, or graceful, or lovely, or compelling, or inspiring, and its nobility resonates simultaneously along so many dimensions, that it makes us fully alive to our own existence. Sometimes just being is enough, but in full awareness of our own existence, we can sometimes utter the two words anathema to existentialists. God exists. Art in this sense is Incarnational. A deeper appreciation of being alive, whether through artistic or natural beauty, makes us more aware that it is a miracle that we are here. The miracle asks for an explanation, and the explanation that comes to mind for many people, indoctrinated or not, is God. When the revelation provided by the Incarnation of Christ and the testimony of the church and scriptures are accessible, God consciousness is distinct and rationally articulate.

The Beauty of the Infinite

"The infinite is beautiful because God is Trinity; and because all being belongs to God's infinity, a Christian ontology appears and properly belongs within a theological aesthetics."
--David Bentley Hart

Plato, Neoplatonism, Music, and the Incarnation

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

The Latin Mass

"If our liturgical practice is anthropocentric and devoid of transcendent mystery, how will congregants at such a liturgy develop a faith that is Christocentric and alive to God’s mystery? If our liturgical vehicle is intrinsically subjective and particular, how can it present our common faith in a unified way in the midst of cultural diversity? If the Mass is local in dialect and communitarian in emphasis, how will it convey the shared transcendent faith of the universal Church? It is worth noting that one of the guiding purposes of the publication of the universal Catechism of the Catholic Church was to present the fullness of the Faith in a common and unified way throughout the world. But our liturgical practice is, catechetically speaking, pulling us in a direction quite opposed to the Catechism’s aims and spirit."
--Jude A. Huntz in The New Oxford Review
The Liturgy as Catechism