Music as “Sacramental”: Foundations for a Theology of Music in the Spiritual Life
by
Christina Marie Labriola
A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Regis College and the Graduate Centre for Theological Studies of the Toronto School of Theology. In partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Theology awarded by Regis College and the University of Toronto
© Copyright by Christina Marie Labriola 2018
Music as “Sacramental”: Foundations for a Theology of Music in the Spiritual Life
Christina Marie Labriola
Doctor of Theology
Regis College and the University of Toronto
2018 Abstract This thesis seeks to present a theological basis for the significant role of music in the encounter with God, by way of the Catholic spiritual tradition. It argues that musical experience, in its appeal to the entirety of the human person, is readily able to serve as a means of God’s self- revelation and a medium of grace, readying those who engage in it to encounter the divine, and possibly becoming, in and of itself, a locus of that encounter. The way in which music functions as sacramental is upheld by its participation in the mysteries of beauty and of human creativity, and ultimately undergirded by the Incarnation. This dissertation contends that the spiritual resonance of music is grounded in, as well as reveals afresh, the sacramental world in which we live. Further, this project grants music a pastoral value, in claiming its capability, allied with beauty, to contribute to our spiritual formation in Christ, commissioning us in the Christian vocation to love.
Taking a thematic approach, this study employs Catholic theology and spirituality as a framework by which to understand and incorporate the potentiality and relevance of music in the life of faith. The conclusion of each chapter discusses particular pieces of music that serve to apply and to deepen the theological insights that went before. Chapter 1 takes sacramentality as a starting point, proposing that the dynamic of music-making is an echo of the sacramental cycle
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of receiving-offering-receiving anew. Chapter 2 moves to a consideration of the Incarnation, perception via the spiritual senses, and music’s relationship to the body. Chapter 3 pursues beauty as a transcendental property of Being and music’s role in bearing the beautiful. Chapter 4 examines contemplation, employing the musical metaphor of “listening” to the life of prayer.
Finally, Chapter 5 posits the repercussions of music’s sacramentality for our relationship with
God and neighbour, i.e., the fruitfulness of Christian discipleship that finds its ultimate model in the Blessed Virgin Mary.
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Acknowledgements I am humbled by the amount of encouragement and support I have received from so many during my time as a doctoral student and in preparing this thesis, a true labour of love. First, I have been blessed to have received the brilliant guidance of Professor Gill Goulding, CJ as my thesis supervisor. I thank her for her tireless generosity, and for the example she is to me and to all of her students of integrity in faith, thought, word, and deed. Likewise, I am deeply grateful to my thesis committee members, Professor Rebekah Smick and Professor Swee Hong Lim, for the many ways they have inspired and encouraged my creative imaginings and pursuits, both artistic and academic, in church and classroom alike. I also wish to acknowledge and to thank Professor Bennett Zon (Durham University) and Professor Lori-Anne Dolloff (University of Toronto, Faculty of Music) for their thorough and thoughtful reading of my work, and the illuminating and helpful points they raised during the examination stage.
I thank Professor Michael O’Connor for his staunch support of my academic and musical endeavours, and for the always delightful opportunities to collaborate, whether through the St. Michael’s College Schola Cantorum, the Music, Theology, and Justice project, the Music and Theology reading group, or future projects yet unseen, which have greatly enriched my theological thinking about music, and this present work. I thank Professor Michael Stoeber for his support of my interests in mysticism, spiritual experience, and the arts, and for the opportunities for professional enrichment he has kindly afforded me as a Regis doctoral student. I wish also to thank Dr. Hyun-Ah Kim for her advice and encouragement along my academic path and for her exciting classes on the theology of music and music in world religions. These have stayed with me and had a profound impact on my work.
I wish to extend my thanks to those communities of faith I have been privileged to serve through song, putting into practice what I believe about music’s sacramental power: the Newman Centre (my dear choir, Fr. Chris Cauchi and Fr. Peter Turrone, the students, staff, and parishioners, and the many lifelong friends I have made there), St. Peter’s (the Paulists and Fr. Michael McGourty, and the music ministry team, especially Roy Lee for his keen copyediting eye!), Regis College (Sean Mulrooney, the choir at the Wednesday liturgies, and all of my “Ignatian” friends), the Serra House and Spiritual Year seminarians at St. Augustine’s, and my friends, colleagues, and students at Emmanuel College.
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I am grateful to Sr. Ann McGill, FCJ, for her prayerful support and counsel, and to all my wonderful friends (and siblings), who have been steadfast in their encouragement and in offering me what I needed as I worked on my thesis: be it a prayer, a song, a snack break, or a laugh.
Most of all, to my beloved family: my parents Antonio and Josephine, my siblings Anthony, Michelle, Nic, Joanna, Samantha, Simon, and niece Lucy, and to my dear grandparents, godparents, and extended family – I thank you for your unconditional love and dedicate this thesis to you, with that same love. Thank you for nurturing my musicality and artistic and intellectual curiosity, and instilling in me a profound love of goodness and beauty in art and life.
Finally, I give thanks with all my heart to the Lord Jesus Christ, whose love is the source of all my joy, and who has implanted in me the desire to seek Him always through what is good, true, and beautiful in our sacramental world.
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Contents List of Tables………………………………………………………………………………….....ix List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….x Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………...1 Music and the Sacred……………………………………………………………………...1 Cross-Currents in Music and Theology…………………………………………………...3 Revelation in Musical Experience…..…………………………………………………...15 Music and the Body…………………………………………………………………...…17 Music as Sacrament?...... 19 A Way Forward…………………………………………………………………………..20 Chapter One: Music and Sacramentality in the Catholic Imagination……………………..25 Sacrament and Sacramentality: Some Preliminaries…………………………………….25 Outward Sign of Inward Grace…………………………………………………..26 A Wider Sense of Sacramentality?...... 28 Christ as Primary Sacrament……………………………………………………..30 Music as Mediator of Body and Spirit, Symbol of Grace, and Locus of Presence………………………………………………………………………… 32 “Charged with the Grandeur of God”: Creation and Incarnation as Foundational for Sacramentality………..………………………………………………………36 The Sacramental Imagination: An “Enchanted” View of Reality……………….36 Franciscan and Ignatian Voices………………………………………………….40 The Sacramental Cycle: Self-Gift and Symbolic Exchange in Music……………...……47 Musical Recap: Beethoven and Bartók in Awe of Life………………………………….52 Beethoven: String Quartet no. 15, Op. 132, 3rd movement (“Heiliger Dankgesang”)…………………………………………………………………….52 Bartók, Piano Concerto No. 3, Second Movement: Andante Religioso…………56 Conclusion….……………………………………………………………………60 Chapter Two: Music and Incarnation………………………………………………………...62 “This is my body”: A Meditation of Jesus’s Bodiliness (and Our Own in Light of His)..64
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“My Whole Being Longs for You”: The Spiritual Senses……………………………….67 The Spiritual Senses and the Restoration of the Imago Dei………………………..77 Sensual Language and the Erotic Mystical………………………………………79 Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi…...…………...83 Incarnate Music…………………………………………………………………………..84 Christ and the New Song………………………………………………………...87 Musical Recap: Incarnate Meditations by MacMillan and Messiaen……………………93 MacMillan, Seven Last Words from the Cross, Cantata for chorus and strings, III. Verily I say unto you, today thou shalt be with me in paradise (1993)……...93 Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps, VIII. Louange à l’immortalité de Jésus (1940-41)………...……………………………………………………………..104 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...111 Chapter Three: Music and Beauty…………………………………………………………...113 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..113 Foundations and Presuppositions for a Theology of Beauty…………………………...115 The Transcendental Status of Beauty and the Analogia Entis…………………………..…119 Christ, Archetype of Beauty……………………………………………………………123 Revelation and the Aesthetic Experience………………………………………………126 Creational Beauty………...…………………………………………………………….128 Artistic Beauty………………………………………………………………………….131 Musical Beauty…………………………………………………………………………135 The Sensuous Beauty of Music: The Incarnational Tradition………………….137 The Intelligible Beauty of Music: The Pythagorean Tradition…………………140 Musical Recap: Christ’s Intimate Beauty in Mozart and Ešenvalds……………………143 W.A. Mozart, “Kyrie” and “Et incarnatus est” from Great Mass in C Minor, K.427…………………………………………………………………………...143 Ēriks Ešenvalds: Passion and Resurrection, Part IV, and O Salutaris Hostia....152 Conclusion: The Portal of Musical Beauty……………………………………………..159 Chapter Four: Music and Contemplation………………………………………………..….161
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Introduction……………………………………………………………………….….…161 Contemplative Prayer as Listening in Love……………………………………….……164 Musical Resonances of Contemplation…………………………………………………175 Music as Sonic Icon…………………………………………………………………….179 Musical Recap: Silent Pondering in the Heart in Bach and Pärt……………………….181 Bach: “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” in the St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244….……………………………………………………………………181 Arvo Pärt: “The Beatitudes,” for SATB choir and organ (1990)……………....190 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...200 Chapter Five: Music, Christian Discipleship, and Fruitfulness……………………………202 Service, Charity, and Fruitfulness as Christian Discipleship…………………………...203 Service, Charity, and Fruitfulness as the Culmination of the Mystic Way……………..206 Mary and the Christian Vocation of Beauty……………………………………………209 O Tu Suavissima Virga: Hildegard of Bingen’s Musical Portrait of Mary…………….213 Making Connections: Music, Magnificat, and Ministry………………………………..222 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………..225 “Now the ears of my ears awake”: The Contemplative Encounter with Beauty in Music and Faith………………………………………………………………………………..225 Implications and Possibilities for Future Research……………………………………..236 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………...240 Primary Sources……………..……………..……………..……………..……………...240 Secondary Sources…………..……………..……………..……………..……………...248 Musical Sources……………..……………..……………..……………..……………...255 Appendix……………………………………………………………………………………….258 Musical Selections with Links to Recordings for Listening……………………………245 Copyright Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………..260
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List of Tables Table 1: Movements and Scriptural References of MacMillan’s Seven Last Words……………95 Table 2: Movements and Instrumentation of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps…..……106 Table 3: Text and translation of O Salutaris Hostia…………………………………………………156 Table 4: Text and translation of “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben”……………………...185 Table 5: Resolutions on final syllables of phrases in Pärt’s The Beatitudes…...…………………199 Table 6: Text and translation of Hildegard’s O tu suavissima virga………………………………214 Table 7: Text and translation of Hildegard’s Ave Generosa………………………………………..216
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List of Figures Figure 1.1: The opening of the Heiliger Dankgesang (Beethoven)...... 54 Figure 1.2: “Feeling new strength” (Beethoven)...... 55 Figure 1.3: The opening of the second movement (Bartók)...... 57 Figure 1.4: The beginning of the contrasting B section (Bartók)...... 59 Figure 1.5: The conclusion of the second movement (Bartók)...... 60 Figure 2.1: The beginning of the movement (MacMillan)...... 98 Figure 2.2: Second iteration of “Ecce lignum crucis” (MacMillan)...... 100 Figure 2.3: The third “Venite adoremus” (MacMillan)…………………………..…………….101 Figure 2.4: The words of Christ (MacMillan)………………………………………………….103
Figure 2.5: Opening of the movement (Messiaen)...... 109 Figure 2.6: The conclusion of the movement (Messiaen)………………………………………110 Figure 3.1: Beginning of the soprano solo (Mozart, “Kyrie”)………………..………………...145 Figure 3.2: The “simple, graceful… ravishing” melodic arc (Mozart, “Kyrie”)……………….146 Figure 3.3: Low tones balanced out by a two octave leap up (Mozart, “Kyrie”)………………147 Figure 3.4: Melismatic extension of the word “eleison” (Mozart, “Kyrie”)…………………...147 Figure 3.5: Appoggiatura gesture in the main motive (Mozart, “Et incarnatus est”)………..…148 Figure 3.6: Development of the appoggiatura motive (Mozart, “Et incarnatus est”)………..…149 Figure 3.7: Further development of the appoggiatura motive (Mozart, “Et incarnatus est”)..…149 Figure 3.8: Octave leap in the melody above V7/ii (Mozart, “Et incarnatus est”)……………..150
Figure 3.9: The choir speaks in the words of the (yet unrecognized) Risen Jesus (Ešenvalds, Passion and Resurrection)………………………...……………………………………………………153 Figure 3.10: Mary’s tentative recitative (Ešenvalds, Passion and Resurrection)...... 154 Figure 3.11: The dialogue of Jesus (Quartet and Choir) and Mary Magdalene (Solo Soprano) (Ešenvalds, Passion and Resurrection)………………………. ………………………………………155 Figure 3.12: The opening of the piece (Ešenvalds, O Salutaris Hostia)……………………….157 Figure 3.13: The choir rises to a climax on “Gloria” (Ešenvalds, O Salutaris Hostia)………...158 Figure 4.1: The opening of the aria (Bach)……………………………………………………..187 Figure 4.2: Pauses; augmented 4th; diminished 7ths (Bach)…………...………………………188
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Figure 4.3: The opening of the piece and first two verses (Pärt)……………………………….196 Figure 4.4: The choir’s “Amen” and “surprise” organ entrance (Pärt)…………………………197 Figure 5.1: Freedom and elaborateness of melody; key words emphasized (Hildegard, O tu suavissima virga)……………………………………………………………………………….218 Figure 5.2: Long melisma on “voluit” (Hildegard, O tu suavissima virga)…………………….218 Figure 5.3: Melodic high points and mirrored musical phrases (Hildegard, Ave Generosa)..…219 Figure 6.1: The first 7 measures of i thank you God (Whitacre)………………………….……227 Figure 6.2: Ascending blossoming effect on “opened” (Whitacre)…………………………….229 Figure 6.3: Cluster chord (C-D-E-F-G sounding together) on “wings” (Whitacre)……………231 Figure 6.4a: Soprano solo and undulating chords below (Whitacre)…………………………...233 Figure 6.4b: A similar moment on “unimaginable You” (Whitacre)…………………………..234
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Introduction
“Music and the metaphysical, in the root sense of that term, music and religious feeling, have been virtually inseparable.” —George Steiner1
“This was a music I had never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.” —Salieri, in Peter Schaffer’s Amadeus
Music and the Sacred The relationship of music to the religious inclinations of the human heart may seem to us almost self-evident. Music’s language, capable of immense profundity and immediacy, seems particularly suited to the mysterious complexity of the inner workings of the soul. By the same token, music is our natural recourse in turning towards God in praise—lifting up our words, sanctifying our actions, giving voice to our silent innermost colloquies and desires. Humanity’s natural impulse towards music is innate, just as is our capacity for God. As human beings are religious beings, so too are we musical beings.
Music’s association with religion, both worship in a strict sense and religious feeling more broadly, spans times and cultures and manifests in myriad ways. Music’s ties with religion are strong; the very name music (“art of the Muses”) bespeaks its divine origin. The phenomenon of music in humanity’s past has been associated both with worship of the divine and with esoteric knowledge of the mysteries of the universe. A constellation of religious ideas surrounds music. In ancient civilizations, song was irrevocably linked and even synonymous with cultic praise of the divinity. Ideas of music as an invention of deities, the principle of divine creation, an anticipation of heavenly song, or a way of appeasing or influencing the gods, are prevalent from earliest times. Not only the use of music for religious ends, but also religious speculation about music and its association with the divine is common to the folk religions of the world, ancient Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, and Greek systems of belief, through the Christian Middle Ages and
1 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 216.
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Baroque era, and in mystical Islamic thought and practise.2 The concept of the “Harmony of the Spheres,” the cosmic principle of musical harmony, sustaining and ordering the whole creation and the human being in microcosm, has been vastly pervasive. Dante in La Divina Commedia equates this principle with Divine Love – “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” – and paradise as a celestial liturgy characterized by unending harmony. Hand in hand with this is the Pythagorean notion of music’s mystical-mathematical philosophical status, whereby fundamental numerical relationships in music hold the key to all proportion and order in the cosmos. Together with the legacy of magical-mythical beliefs and metaphysical speculation about music, we have also the connection of music and morality, traced back to the Greeks, an area of utmost concern to the Church Fathers.3 Related is music’s undeniable hold over our emotions and sensuality – our physical selves (for example, its influence over heart rate, mood, movement); and its uncanny ability to arouse for good or ill; to attract (or repulse) us so wholeheartedly. For all this, what is more effective than music in its ability to draw us into a religious frame of mind?
The association of music with religion persists today, though perhaps in a rather more vague, intuitive sense, and not only in questions of liturgical worship or of private religious feeling. That music is laden with relevance for theology is a claim many would share. As Jeremy Begbie puts it, “There is indeed a kind of intuitive, gut feeling that many have about music: that it is in some special way religiously or theologically ‘loaded’”.4 In a manner of its own, different from other forms of human expression, music bears with it a kind of religious resonance. Just what music’s truth claim(s) may be, and in what its connection with theology consists, has been creatively imagined and variously articulated by theologians and musicians alike.
2 Reinhold Hammerstein provides a thorough overview of these ideas in “Music as a Divine Art,” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Philip Wiener, ed. Vol. 3. 1973. 267-272. Cf. his “Music as a Demonic Art,” 264-267, which also proves to undergird the predominance of music’s religious connotations historically, from an inverse perspective.
3 Cf. Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: The Spiritual Dimension of Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, Ltd., 1987.
4 Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2007), 17.
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Cross-Currents in Music and Theology
In Truth is Symphonic, Hans Urs von Balthasar uses the metaphor of a symphony orchestra (the “sounding together” of many instruments, each with its distinctive voice, capabilities, and timbre) to describe Christian pluralism: In his revelation, God performs a symphony, and it is impossible to say which is richer: the seamless genius of his composition or the polyphonous orchestra of Creation that he has prepared to play it. Before the Word of God became man, the world orchestra was ‘fiddling’ about without any plan. . . . Somehow there is the feeling that this cacophonous jumble is only a ‘tuning up’: the A can be heard through everything, like a kind of promise. . . . Then came the Son, the ‘heir of all things’, for whose sake the whole orchestra had been put together. As it performs God’s symphony under the Son’s direction, the meaning of its variety becomes clear. . . . the purpose of its pluralism is this: not to refuse to enter into the unity that lies in God and is imparted by him, but symphonically to get in tune with one another and give allegiance to the transcendent unity. . . . Suddenly, as the music begins, they realize how they are integrated. Not in unison, but what is far more beautiful – in symphony.5
This invocation of music to elucidate a theological concern hints that the depths of music might be plumbed in a way advantageous to theology. This musical image might also be taken further to signify for us the plurality of approaches to and voices within the wide-reaching musico- theological endeavour itself. The theological and pastoral meanings and dimensions of music has always been an important question in the Church’s history. Yet we can note, in recent years in particular, an influx of scholarly interest in the emergent field of “music theology”: the study of music (including musicology, ethnomusicology, and the philosophy, aesthetics, and semiotics of music) in relation to the study of theology (including ethics, liturgics, aesthetics, patristics, ecclesial history, spirituality, systematics, and natural theology). Music has been enlisted in various ways to reconfigure, to reinforce, or to deconstruct doctrinal and theological ideas; likewise, theology has been employed to illuminate the mysterious profundity of music.
The brief review of recent work6 in music theology that follows reveals the truly interdisciplinary nature of such an undertaking, and the manifold ways in which music and theology might be
5 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Truth is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 9. 6 Most studies to which I refer in this overview date from the 2000s or 2010s; Jon M. Spencer's Theological Music is the oldest, from 1991.
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brought together, depending on doctrinal standpoints, assumptions around music analysis and praxis, and the interrelation of the two. This introductory sketch draws on the diverse approaches of scholars linked together by the gravitational pull of the common musico-theological endeavor. I undertake it here at the outset for the purpose of defining my own particular stance, objectives, and overarching argument in this thesis, to which I will turn its conclusion.
Among the most notable scholars in recent years dealing with the intersection of music and theology (and not exclusively in terms of worship) is Jeremy Begbie. His Theology, Music, and Time7 and more recently Resounding Truth8 among others,9 are forays into the ways in which music and theology might be mutually-enriching when brought together. This particular interest fits into his overarching project, “Theology Through the Arts,”10 an attempt to foster dialogue and collaboration among artistic and theological disciplines.
At the outset of Theology, Music and Time, Begbie states his objective: not to offer a systematic theology of music, but rather to suggest ways that theologizing might take place through music, raising up music as an important locus theologicus too often overlooked. By way of working out this objective, he focuses on the theological implications of music’s involvement with time. Resounding Truth rehearses many of the same themes, but does not restrict itself to a study of music’s time-based nature; more broadly, “[i]t is concerned with how God’s truth might ‘sound’ and ‘re-sound’ in the world of music. Put another way, we are asking, what can Christian theology bring to music?”11 This give and take between the two disciplines is indeed at the heart of Begbie’s research interests.
Begbie notes the pitfalls of any project like his: theological “imperialism” on the one hand, wherein theology sets down dogma in advance and does not pay attention to how music actually
7 Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 8 Jeremy S. Begbie, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2007). 9 His most recent publications include: A Peculiar Orthodoxy: Reflections on Theology and the Arts (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2018); Redeeming Transcendence in the Arts: Bearing Witness to the Triune God (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2018); Music, Modernity and God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and numerous articles and chapters on the theme. He has also been involved as editor and or contributor to a number of publications on the topic of theology and the arts, including: with Steven R. Guthrie (eds.), Resonant Witness: Conversations Between Music and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); and Sounding the Depths: Theology Through the Arts (ed.) (London: SCM Press, 2002). 10 C.f.
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operates, and theological “aestheticism” on the other, the laying aside of all Christian presuppositions to attempt to give music its proper due.12 In taking music up into the theological enterprise, Begbie is careful to allow theological norms (based on an Anglican Christian orientation towards a presupposition of God’s ongoing relationship with the world), and not those of musical practice, to dictate the kind of conclusions at which he arrives: [M]y intention throughout has been to allow the ultimate ‘pressure of interpretation’ to come not from musical practice considered in and of itself (as some kind of autonomous, normative arbiter), but from a focus on the activity of the triune God, definitively disclosed in Jesus Christ, whose purpose is the participation of the world – including music – in his own triune life.13
As such, he does not look to music for the creation of brand new theological principles but rather employs the way in which music works or unfolds to refocus, reframe, or re-conceptualize existing Christian, and specifically Anglican, doctrine.14
Begbie is clear that when he refers to music, it is not as an abstract entity, but rather, a socially and culturally embedded practice or set of practices. The decidedly performative nature of music means that it might advance theology by “enacting theological wisdom”.15 In particular, Begbie (a classical pianist) chooses to focus on Western art music (largely tonal and abstract, though not excluding popular forms or jazz). His concern is largely with the way that the sounds of music function as distinct from words and extra-musical associations.
In Theology, Music and Time, Begbie touches upon musical concepts he finds meaningful for theology, including: the perception of music as a time-based experience which values time and the body, tension and resolution in music related to hope and eschatology, repetition related to liturgical action, and improvisation as freedom and self-giving. Whereas some rhetoric around music’s spiritual connections has tended to stress its immateriality, and its ability to conjure a seemingly timeless condition,16 Begbie stresses just the opposite. He argues that music presents
12 Ibid., 22. 13 Theology, Music and Time, 278. 14 Conversely, Heidi Epstein finds this to be a “straitjacketing” of music and a failure of Begbie’s approach; Heidi Epstein, Melting the Venusberg: A Feminist Theology of Music (New York : Continuum, 2004), 84, 86. 15 Theology, Music and Time, 5. 16 Edward Foley, for example, exhibits this line of thought when he argues that music offers, through sound, an experience of impermanence and of the intangible; “Music as Sound Spirituality.” The Way Supplement 96 (1999): 56-7.
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us with a non-linear temporality that affords an important critique of the “myth of passage” – the notion that only the present can be said in any real way to exist. In musical time, past, present and future are always related to each other, fruitfully interwoven: “We are not given an evaporating present but a present through which the past is directed towards the future”.17 Music thereby presents a picture of “fruitful transience” in which the finite nature of creation does not undermine its goodness or reality.
Begbie argues that we can learn about eschatological hope from music’s future-directedness. Music deals largely in anticipation, setting up a teleological dynamic of equilibrium-tension- resolution as note, chord, bar, and phrase give way to what follows in interrelated metrical waves.18 Music thrives on the dynamic of promise and fulfillment; lesser fulfillments ease the tension while simultaneously increasing it in pointing beyond themselves to (or prefiguring) larger and more final resolutions to come. The experience of enjoying the expectation and deferred resolution in music teaches us that tension and waiting are valuable in and of themselves; indeed something is being learned through them that could not be acquired otherwise. By giving one’s self over to music and its waves of expectation and delayed gratification, “[m]usic schools us in the art of patience”.19
In a distinct manner, yet one complementary to Begbie’s aims, Maeve Louise Heaney, VDMF, seeks a theological understanding of music grounded in the Catholic tradition in Music as Theology: What Music Says About the Word.20 “If theology is ‘faith seeking understanding,’” she asks, citing Anselm's classic definition, “could music not also be theological? Does it not offer us, at the very least, a form of understanding our faith, and perhaps even an aid in attaining and entering into that faith?”21 Her main contention is that music offers an approach to faith and provides a mode of theologizing of its very own, discrete from yet complementary to the linguistic and conceptual mode in which theology is normally done.22 If this is so, it would be a mistake not to be attentive to it: “as there are things which God may only be saying through
17 Theology, Music and Time, 67. 18 Ibid., 38. 19 Ibid., 87. 20 Maeve Louise Heaney, Music as Theology: What Music Says about the Word. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012). 21 Heaney, 1. 22 Ibid.
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music, it would be advisable to listen”.23 By means of substantiating this theologizing through music, Heaney dialogues with thinkers from musicology, ethnomusicology, and musical semiotics (primarily in the latter case Jean Jacques Nattiez) to gain some clarity about how music communicates meaning; and connects this with theological epistemology and theological aesthetics.24 Throughout, Heaney identifies and spells out certain traits of music25 which relate to theology, for example, “it is free, it is embodied, and it is truthful”.26 At one point, she touches on a musical theodicy: “Music is a form of presence that does not seek to ‘give answers’: it integrates player and listener in a common space”.27 Finally, she relates music to theology through the vocational aspect of the Christian musician (with which she strongly identifies on a personal level): a response to the calling to love with all one's mind, heart, soul, and strength.28
United Methodist pastor, musician, and liturgical scholar Don Saliers’s aim in the slim but ambitious volume, Music and Theology is “to gain a deeper understanding of how music can be theological, and theology can be conceived as musical.”29 Pairing the two together, Saliers notes the religious or quasi-religious sentiment that often accompanies profound musical experiences and asks, “How might theological discourse require music for its realization, and why do many forms of music evoke religious awareness that calls for theological interpretation?”30 His hypothesis is that “in music it may be possible to sound, and thus to hear, the entire range of our being before God”; and furthermore, the various arts, and perhaps music in a particular way, are able to embody and provide occasion for the contemplative beholding of “the truth of things, as well the source of goodness and beauty”.31 Saliers situates music’s mediation of theological truth in its relation to silence and mystery, to the narrative quality of human experience, and in its approach to the inexpressible.32 Music’s power to enthrall and to move us deeply “has both contemplative and prophetic powers, and is visionary, carrying with it a ‘sense’ of life and the
23 Ibid., 1-2. 24 Her interlocutors include Hans Urs von Balthasar, Pierangelo Sequeri, Richard Viladesau, Alejandro Garcia- Rivera, Frank Burch Brown, Jeremy Begbie and Don Saliers. 25 Heaney states that she is concerned primarily with “contemporary music” in an effort to dialogue with a society in the West which often seems to seek, through music, a substitute spirituality (6ff). 26 Heaney, 10. 27 Heaney, 283. 28 Heaney, 299. 29 Don Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville : Abingdon Press, 2007), ix. 30 Ibid. 31 Saliers, xii; xi. 32 Saliers, 61.
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world”.33 Akin to Heaney’s suggestion, that there might be a uniquely musical mode of revelation (religious truth that can be communicated or expressed solely through musical means), Saliers posits music as theology as a step beyond conventional linguistic forms: “the possibility of an ‘acoustical’ theology’”.34
As a pastoral theologian, Saliers focuses on music in the context of worship as the natural meeting point of music and theology and primary place of enacted theology through music. Sensitive, first, to pluralism in the musical practices of the worldwide Church (and cross- religiously), and second, to the potential of music of many genres and contexts to provoke religious feeling, Saliers is dismissive of the notion that a particular music can be characterized as sacred;35 nor does he privilege high art: “We need not work with dichotomies between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ music as such. Perhaps we need much more to attend to what can be called the ‘sacrality’ or even the ‘sacramentality’ of music wherever and whenever we are moved out of ourselves and our habitual, common-sense world”.36
Lutheran pastor and liturgical musician Albert Blackwell situates music within the category of the sacramental in his The Sacred in Music,37 allowing him to point to music as potentially revelatory and epiphanic, a medium of God's self-communication and grace. It is a metaphysical understanding of God’s relationship with the world that opens up possibilities for all music (though Western art music receives the majority of his attention). Blackwell attempts to move beyond any hard and fast delimitation of sacred and secular in discussing how music can function as sacramental according to both “Pythagorean” and “Incarnational” modes of thought, and considers music in relation to beauty, mysticism, and religious emotion and mood. Along a similar vein, The Extravagance of Music by David Brown and Gavin Hopps is predicated upon the theological premise of the generosity of the Christian God and “the ways in which music, both classical and popular, may be able to engender religious experience”38 by participating in this expansive model of divine generosity.
33 Saliers, 59. 34 Saliers, 21. 35 Cf. Tom Beaudoin, ed. Secular Music and Sacred Theology (Collegeville, Min.: Liturgical Press, 2013). 36 Saliers, 60. 37Albert L. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999). 38 David Brown and Gavin Hopps, The Extravagance of Music (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2018).
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Another “branch” of research into music theology is grounded in musicology first and assumes the priorities and methodologies of musical rhetoric, theory, history, analysis, and practice. Such an approach may possibly regard theology and its conclusions as a non-fixed point; in flux. Music itself becomes a way of doing theology that offers unique and fresh insights as a result. Sander van Maas’s study of Messiaen, The Reinvention of Religious Music,39 and the collection he edited with Robert Sholl, Contemporary Music and Spirituality,40 are examples. Alternatively, studies of this kind might proceed along musicological lines in elucidating a composer’s biography and musical output as it relates to questions of faith and theology, as in musicologist Calvin R. Stapert’s studies of Haydn (Playing Before the Lord41) and J.S. Bach (My Only Comfort42). A related approach is the theological consideration of music situated in its cultural, sociological, and historical setting; as, for example, in the collection Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (edited by Martin V. Clarke).43
Férdia J. Stone-Davis’s Musical Beauty44 and the collection of essays, Music and Transcendence45 (edited by Stone-Davis) represent the related project of interposing philosophical approaches to religion and music, a wide-ranging endeavour embracing (philosophical-theological) notions of power and freedom, transcendence and sublimity, time and space, natural theology, aesthetics, and human experience; and (philosophical-musical) concepts such as acoustics, feeling, immediacy, the relationality of subject and object, imaginative spaces of meaning making, and liminality.
The more explicitly “liturgical” facet of music theology tends to focus on the study of church music and pastoral concerns, drawing out the ways in which the musical practices (by which is largely meant congregational singing) of a gathered assembly help (and have helped,
39 Sander van Maas, The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough Toward the Beyond (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 40 Robert Sholl and Sander van Mass, eds., Contemporary Music and Spirituality (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016). 41 Calvin R. Stapert, Playing Before the Lord: The Life and Work of Joseph Haydn (Grand Rapids; Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014). 42 Calvin R. Stapert, My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach (Grand Rapids; Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000). 43 Martin V. Clarke, ed., Music and Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London; New York: Routledge, 2016). 44 Férdia J. Stone-Davis, Music and Beauty: Negotiating the Boundary between Subject and Object (Cascade, Wipf & Stock, 2011). 45 Férdia J. Stone-Davis, ed., Music and Transcendence (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
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historically) to shape and to express the theology of that community whilst simultaneously serving to form it. Notably, the majority of research of this ilk stems from and is rooted in Protestant traditions. Harold Best, in Music Through the Eyes of Faith,46 treats a plethora of questions and issues surrounding music in worship from an American Protestant perspective, including how to evaluate musical quality, meaning, and functionality, and arguing in favour of musical pluralism within Christian worship. Sacred music, in Best’s view, typifies the Christian response to the God’s grace offered in Jesus, where the creativity of music-making serves as a conduit of that grace, and the Christian musician becomes an ambassador for Christ. More recently, church music scholar and ethnomusicologist C. Michael Hawn has offered a model of just and theologically authentic worship through an embrace of the music of a global Church.47 Thomas H. Troeger’s Music as Prayer48 deals with the vocation of the church musician and the theology of music in and as worship by reflecting in a homiletic manner on music’s spiritual depths and resonances. Meanwhile, Quentin Faulkner, in Wiser Than Despair,49 takes an historical approach by providing an overview of the Church’s philosophical and theological thinking about music through the generations, including predecessors in Greek and Hebrew sources. Calvin Stapert’s A New Song for an Old World50 represents in some ways a combination of these approaches by encouraging his readers to learn from the early church in taking the rhetorical and ethical power of music seriously. The work of Paul Westermeyer51 (in the Evangelical Lutheran tradition) and of Robin A. Leaver52 (with special interests in the Reformation and the music of Bach) offers further prominent examples of historically sensitive and pastorally concerned approaches to the study of Church music. As for discerning what kinds of music are suitable for worship, it is worth bearing in mind that Christian music as worship is
46Harold Best, Music Through the Eyes of Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993). 47 C. Michael Hawn, Gather Into One: Praying and Singing Globally (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003). 48 Thomas H. Troeger, Music as Prayer: The Theology and Practice of Church Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 49 Quentin Faulkner, Wiser Than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996). 50 Calvin R. Stapert, A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church (Cedar Rapids; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2006). 51 For example: Paul Westermeyer, Te Deum: The Church and Music (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998); Paul Westermeyer, The Church Musician (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997). 52 For example: Robin A. Leaver, Luther’s Liturgical Music: Principles and Implications (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017); Robin A. Leaver and Joyce Ann Zimmerman C.PP.S., eds., Liturgy and Music: Lifetime Learning (Collegeville: Minnesota, 1998).
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meant to be a prayerful response to God, not entertainment and not a stimulant, but part of the whole Church’s (and Creation’s) offering of praise. Frank Burch Brown has considered the aesthetic dimension of music in liturgy in his Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste.53 While questions of aesthetics in worship can polarize people, especially as regards music, Brown explicates a discerning, authentic way to navigate the so-called “worship wars.” The concept of taste, that is, aesthetic discernment and response, has, he argues, moral and religious dimensions. To neglect this aesthetic discernment is to do a disservice to the potential of art to mediate a sense of the presence of God. Music and theology are made to interact to vastly different ends in the approach of Jon M. Spencer in his 1991 work, Theological Music: Introduction to Theomusicology.54 Spencer’s primary field of research is African-American culture, which serves as a case study and jumping-off point for the method of inquiry he seeks to elucidate. He calls this methodology “theomusicology,” defined as a “theologically informed musicology, which especially borrows thought and method from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy”.55 In his model, the theomusicologist researches “the ethical, religious, and mythological” dimensions of music as it functions in three cultural domains, “the sacred (the religious), the secular (the theistic unreligious), and the profane (the atheistic irreligious),” a tripartite worldview he borrows from Augustine’s City of God.56 As Spencer defines it, “theomusicology” is an intertextual endeavour, interested, not with developing a theology of music of one kind or another, but with consciously integrating theological concerns into the cultural and historical study of music. It is an attempt to redress the failure of historical musicology and ethnomusicology to “uncover the ethical, religious, and mythological undertones or essences of music and its creators and consumers as a means of understanding the very soul of world cultures”.57 By taking theological concerns into account, which, often, are intertwined with musical practice and social identity, the “theomusicologist” should arrive at a more complete picture of the way music functions for a particular cultural group in a given context.
A stellar example of a philosophically transgressive or deconstructive approach to music
53 Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 54Jon M. Spencer, Theological Music: Introduction to Theomusicology (Praeger, 1991). 55 Spencer, xi. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 161.
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theology is the work of Heidi Epstein. Epstein’s intention in her ambitious, far-reaching work of scholarship, Melting the Venusberg,58 is to wrest music away from servitude to “masculinist” theological narratives of order and harmony and to reclaim it for feminist theology. Her book seeks to expose standard theological thinking about music as sexist in its preoccupation with harmony, transcendence, and order. This distances her from the mainstream tradition: Several dogmatic theologies of music already exist, and . . . they become musical apologetics for bolstering doctrinal truths, usually rooted in music’s symbolic/sonic reiteration of Christian harmonies – its redemptions, for example, of time and space. Systematic theology’s prerequisites want theology, like music, to begin and end a certain way – classically, euphoniously, with emphatic final cadences.59
In proposing an alternative way forward, she restores a voice to marginalized women and queer musicians and composers. Theologizing about music in feminist terms leads her to relate the passionate and erotic pulse of music to an imitation of Christ’s passion and bodily presence. She sees the person of Christ as paradigmatic “for comprehending the nature and purpose of divine- human interactions,” and finds a way to extend this into the relational dynamics “within human musicality itself”.60
Dutch philosopher Marcel Cobussen takes the critique of traditional, institutionalized models of “spiritual” reflection on music (via religion) in a very different direction, by assuming an irreconcilable split between the liminal spirituality music engenders and any kind of traditionally-derived religious meaning. His book, Thresholds, is an attempt, in his words, to “rethink spirituality through music.” 61 When Cobussen speaks of “spirituality,” he has in mind a decidedly postmodern, deconstructionist notion of the spiritual that is thoroughly disconnected from (and even in reaction against) conventional religious doctrines and institutions, or any metaphysical presuppositions at all. He intentionally (and at times insistently) disengages with religion, and thus rejects concepts of music as an otherworldly phenomenon, and of spirituality as the prerogative of religion. His is an unsettled, nomadic, shifting spirituality devoid of the transcendent. Cobussen draws on postmodern philosophers to express his notion of the spiritual
58Heidi Epstein, Melting the Venusberg: A Feminist Theology of Music (New York: Continuum, 2004). 59 Epstein, 2. 60 Epstein, 3. 61Marcel Cobussen. Thresholds: Rethinking Spirituality Through Music (Aldershot, Hants ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2008).
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without God, as a human groping and searching at the fringe of consciousness into the abyss. He allies himself with a postmodern need to explore “the empty space, no longer inhabited by . . . God”.62 Cobussen does away with the notion of the composer or musician as intermediary between heaven and earth, or conduit of the divine.63 Instead, he sees the gropings of music as a kind of stab in the dark. Cobussen conceives of this spiritual questing, not as reaching up to a transcendent God, but as a turn toward the human subject, in God’s absence.
The present study locates itself within a radically different positionality and orientation than that of Cobussen’s critical postmodern account, one which is disentangled from religious belief and a sense of the divine. Living and moving instead in the milieu of the Catholic faith, and unwilling and unable to conceive of a spirituality devoid of God, transcendence, or the possibility for genuine religious experience, I find it necessitous to place Christ at the centre of my model for musically-informed spirituality and theologically-infused music-making, and to attempt a more integrative endeavour that affirms and builds upon the concerns, assertions, and suppositions of Catholic theology.
The plethora of approaches to music theology I have outlined heretofore represent an array of denominational (and extra-denominational) perspectives, each with its own preconceptions, priorities, and doctrinal nuances, yet my own approach will be one of synthesis, intentionally drawing from a range of sources under the umbrella of the wider Christian tradition, in order to stimulate dialogue and collaboration.
In developing this integrative, Catholic approach, I have recourse to the insights of Catholic priest and scholar Richard Viladesau. In his endeavour to establish the theological value of the aesthetic (made manifest through the arts), he provides a helpful way to organize our thoughts around music’s religious ramifications. He identifies three ways in which music leads the mind to the sacred: (1) by being the bearer of accompaniment to sacred words, gestures, or motions; (2) by association with emotions characteristic of religious psychological states; and (3) by the
62 Cobussen, 25. 63These are classical ideas from antiquity which have influenced subsequent theologizing about music. Cf. Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: The Spiritual Dimension of Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, Ltd., 1987).
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manifestation of beauty as the sign of the transcendental goal of the human spirit.64 The liturgical function of music is mentioned first. In this role, it uplifts prayer, praise, and liturgical action, giving “wings” to prayer and sacred text. Second, seeing music as a kind of compendium of human emotion, he names its emotional function as a “tonal analogue of emotive life,” including, in a central way, those emotions associated with the encounter with the holy. Apart from liturgical and emotional/psychological functions of music vis à vis the sacred, the third point listed here, its ability to minister beauty, is key. Viladesau locates in the experience of the beautiful a revelation of God, in that beauty expresses, through form, the joy of existence: “To experience beauty is to experience a deep-seated ‘yes’ to being”.65
What exactly happens when we receive music in a religious mode; when we feel humbled or uplifted, moved towards an encounter with God through music? Is it simply that certain kinds of music remind us of the sensation we experience in exalted moments of prayer? Viladesau asks: “Is musical experience merely the emotional analogue of sacred experience so that it works exclusively by association, or can music and art in themselves be an experience of the sacred?”66 In other words, is “the Holy” (Otto’s mysterium tremens et fascinans) a separate experience unto itself, or does it ground experiences of beauty, goodness, and truth? Viladesau argues that we should understand the Holy as a metaexperience: “In this perspective, the ultimate reason for music’s ability to mediate the spiritual is not merely that it echoes emotions that are felt in religious experience, but also and more profoundly that its object is the beautiful, which itself is godly and thus leads towards God.”67 In short, musical experiences mediate the sacred in a real way, a way dependent upon beauty. It is upon this mediation of the sacred that I wish to dwell in this study, attending to and attempting to affirm music’s real capacity to offer up places where our beautiful God can be met.
This thesis will assert that music, in its unique appeal to both sense and spirit, is potentially
64 Richard Viladesau. “Chapter 1: God and the Beautiful: Art as a Way to God.” Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art and Rhetoric (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2000), 43.
65 Ibid., 42.
66 Ibid., 40.
67 Ibid., 41.
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sacramental, and thus open to the experience of the sacred. In the dynamic imperative of music, where divine gift meets human creativity, there dwells the possibility of revelation through purely musical means, which may engage, nourish, and commission the whole human person through an encounter with beauty.
Revelation in Musical Experience
My conception of music as theologically relevant stems from a two-fold conviction regarding musical experience. First, not only is such an experience capable of mirroring the encounter with God in prayer (metaphorical), in ways that stimulate religious emotion and states of mind; but also, second, a musical experience might also be at one and the same time a unique locus of sacred experience (symbolic/sacramental). The two are entwined. I wish to highlight music as a facilitator and intensifier of the Christian life of faith in an experiential mode. It is the sacramental potential of musical experiences that I wish to establish, i.e., that they might be revelatory of God in an embodied, sensuously-engaging manner. Such sacred musical experiences, as is the nature of all sacraments, are initiated by God as gift, engage our physical as well as spiritual selves, involve an offering of ourselves, and result in our being converted and changed. The end of all authentic sacred experiences – the human-divine encounter most fully realized in the person of Jesus Christ – is transformation. I will argue that the same holds true for musical experiences of the sacred, which, in offering an immersive experience of beauty, refresh us and commission us to live “beautifully” – with creativity, openness, freshness, goodness, and compassion.
By sacred experience, I refer to any genuine encounter with God (typically conceived as prayer), and by revelation, I mean the fruits of that encounter. My use of “revelation” should be understood in the personal, contemplative sense, not to be confused with the “deposit of faith” contained in Scripture and Tradition. Revelation in the sense that concerns us here is the ongoing and continual communication and self-disclosure of God to the human person, that occurs primarily in the receptive state of prayer. It may be an intellectual insight, but it might also be a deeper, wordless experience of being loved, forgiven, or known. In this sense, I argue that music has a particularly revelatory character, caught up with its capacity to appeal to and engage multiple aspects of the human person at once: sense and body, memory and emotion, psyche and
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soul. A word of clarification here: to say that revelation is personal is not the same as to say that it is individualistic. We need to guard against an overly individualistic use of music as a received locution of God that fails to take into account the wider community by which that individual is upheld, or the many human participants involved in music-making. God’s Word is not a secret message intended for a single, privileged recipient alone; and music, at its heart, is not a solipsistic endeavour.
While revelation is always God’s initiative, at the same time, it is essential to keep in mind that when we speak of music we speak of something embodied and performed by human beings. Christopher Small has argued68 that music must always be conceived of as an action. It is never something abstract, and not reducible to a written score. When we refer to music, we refer to an enacted experience, a practice or set of practices that are culturally and socially embedded. To remind us of this, he uses music as a verb: “musicking.” For our purposes, it is essential to retain this active, participatory sense of music. Musical experiences, and so the revelations or experiences of God they afford, are never purely objective, but rather comprise a fluid dynamic among many participants – composer(s), performer(s), listener(s), and the God who gifts us with music and enlivens all creative expression. In seeking to establish music as a viable mode of contemplation and transformation in an authentically Christian manner, I do so with this performative sense of “musicking” in mind.
One further element of the kind of experience I am delineating is essential, and this too guards against an overly “privatized” sense of divine revelation in music. The result of a sacred experience is transformation, a change of heart that moves us to reach out to our neighbour in loving service. It is this movement outward that makes us, in the Ignatian ideal, contemplatives in action.69 This going-out into the world in service that the experience of God impels requires
68 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). Cf. Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Philip Stoltzfus, Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics, and God in Western Thought (Bloomsbury Academic, 2006).
69 “One of his associates, Jerome Nadal, spoke of Ignatius as a ‘contemplative in action’, which neatly addressed the supposed disconnection between action and contemplation which became a false dichotomy in many Christian conversations. Contemplation of the divine, in fact, integrates all facets of life.” Keith J. Egan, “Contemplation” in The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality. Philip Sheldrake, ed. (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 212.
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creative collaboration with God, as the source of all goodness.
Music and the Body
One theme I wish to emphasize is the involvement of the body as part of the human response to music. Whereas theological reflection about music has sometimes tended to place undue emphasis on the ephemeral, intangible nature of musical sound, intentional focus on the practice of music as an embodied art form that affects us as whole human beings helps us revalue the body and embodied human experience in the spiritual life. This is with a wider view towards deepening our engagement with this world (rather than seeking an escape from it), in affirming the goodness of creation and Jesus’s presence in His Mystical Body, and highlighting the charitable concern for justice and commitment to neighbour in the Christian vocation.
We have seen how this emphasis on a positive valuation of the body by appealing to the way music works is present in the work of Jeremy Begbie. In Theology, Music, and Time, Begbie desires to redirect Augustine’s focus on unsounded music based on number as the ideal; the notion, via Pythagoras, that music delights the reason through its numerical relations in a higher way than it does the senses through its sounds.70 Begbie takes seriously the engagement of music with both given physicality and temporality, desiring to name them as gifts through which it is possible (and necessary) to meet God.71 He is positive about time as part of God’s ordering of creation and into which God entered in Jesus. Here, and in Resounding Truth, Begbie explores the mutual give-and-take between the disciplines of music and theology that is at the heart of his research interests, listening for ways that such a dialogue might enlighten both disciplines and seeking to establish the delicate balance by which justice is done to both fields.
A positive reappraisal of human physicality in the dynamic between music and theology is a key theme in the unique contribution of Maeve Louise Heaney. Heaney advocates for a re- engagement with the ongoing physical presence of Jesus in and through His ascension as a way to frame theology done in a musical mode.72 Central to Heaney’s project is an affirmation of
70 Jeremy S. Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 82.
71 Ibid., 34.
72 Maeve Louise Heaney, Music as Theology: What Music Says about the Word (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012).
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creation and the body, based on the Incarnation and the continued physical presence of the glorified and ascended body of Jesus in the world. Like Begbie, she is eager to find in music the means to bolster such an affirmation.
Heaney engages the insights of Transformation Theology, a movement associated with Catholic theologian Oliver Davies and colleagues at King’s College London.73 Transformation Theology understands the ascension of Jesus not as a leave-taking, but as part of the wholly revolutionary movement by which (together with the resurrection and the sending of the Spirit) the transformation of the created order is inaugurated. The incarnation is not revoked; rather, in Christ, our humanity is taken up into God, a signal and promise of the full consummation to come.
Jesus’s real presence to us is so radically immanent and all-encompassing, that we can relate to Him in ways those who knew Him in his earthly life could not: “We are in a privileged situation with respect to the disciples, enabled to live an intimacy with Christ in every present moment that they could not have imagined.”74 Having “assumed humanity and the cosmos in himself,” Christ’s presence to us is now universal:75 “In him we live, and move, and have our being.”76 Through the Spirit, Christ continues to mediate the presence of God, accompanying us and available to us at every moment. Heaney suggests that one of the ways “Jesus’ ongoing embodied presence” is mediated to us in the present moment might be through music and its impact on our life in the body, in the immediacy of that moment.77 Heaney (like Begbie) approves of an interpretation of musical practice that sees it situating us in, rather than divorcing us from, our physical existence; rather than “[taking] us out of our bodies to experience God above,” it “[opens] our embodied spirits to a greater presence of God within and through our transformed existence.”78 This transformed
73 In Davies’s own words, this new theological movement involves “the rediscovery of the real world of embodied sensible human experience in space and time as the ongoing and indispensable site of God's self-revelation today, and therefore as a primary and indispensable source of theological authority today.” Oliver Davies, Paul D. Janz, Clemens Sedmak, Transformation Theology: Church in the World (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2008); quoted in Heaney, Music as Theology, 262. 74 Heaney, Music as Theology, 280. The Eucharist is a manifest example. 75 Ibid., 279. 76 Acts 17:28. 77 Heaney, Music as Theology, 266. 78 Ibid., 269.
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existence is one in which body and soul are not at odds. Rather, the paradigm of matter/spirit, heaven/earth, are, for the Christian, now brought together in Christ.
Music as Sacrament?
Entering into the dialogue on music and theology today from a Catholic perspective, I wish to make a case for music as informing a meaningful and authentic spirituality, arguing for music’s spiritually-enriching potential, both within and apart from liturgical contexts, in light of the Catholic understanding of sacramentality. For this reason, this study will be unique in its treatment of music’s spiritual benefit from a pastoral perspective, grounded in Catholic theologies of religious experience, beauty/aesthetics, prayer, and the sacraments. In referring to music as “potentially sacramental,” I am explicitly drawing from Albert Blackwell’s The Sacred in Music, where the author presents a similar claim: “Dwelling at music’s heart is a sacramental potency, awaiting only appropriate times and places for its actualisation, for manifesting the holy and for expressing our experiences of the holy”.79 Blackwell discusses the ways that music might touch both sense and intellect with “God’s logic and God’s love,” undergirded by a panentheistic understanding of God’s relationship with the world. He shows that the notion of sacramentality, understood broadly as any intersection of infinite/divine and finite/human, can accommodate a variety of interpretations of music’s theological relevance: from the ancient emphasis on cosmic-mathematical realities to the romantic emphasis on religious emotion, the way music functions liturgically, and theologies of beauty and mysticism with respect to music.
Taking my cue from this “sacramental” mode of understanding music’s sacred potential, I will develop this notion by pursuing sacramentality as a worldview that imbues sensuous reality with spiritual import; a worldview at the heart of the Catholic imagination: Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. But these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and our world haunted by a sense that the objects, events and persons of daily life are revelations of grace. . . . This special Catholic imagination can
79 Albert L. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 28.
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appropriately be called sacramental. It sees created reality as a “sacrament,” that is, a revelation of the presence of God.80
What does it mean to say that music is “sacramental”? The concept of a sacrament deals with materiality, symbolism, presence, and transformation. It entails a delicate balance of gift and offering – receiving/gathering, offering, and receiving anew. In the Eucharist, we receive wheat and grape from the Father, offer them as bread and wine (work of human hands), and receive them back as Christ’s body and blood. All sacraments contain elements of this cycle of receiving our very existence as gift, delighting and offering thanks by offering it back to the Father, and in so doing, receiving blessing in and through the experience of giving thanks: It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God. For, although you have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation through Christ our Lord. And so, in company with the choirs of Angels, we praise you, and with joy we proclaim: Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts…81
It is just this dynamic that I believe is present in the experience of music. Receiving music as a good gift, we render it back through an offering, (a “sacrifice”), and through the experience itself, are stirred, transformed, moved; in short, we encounter God.
I wish to be clear in adopting the language of sacrament in regards to music that I am by no means proposing an alternative to the sacramental life of the Church – a way to bypass the centrality of baptism, the Eucharist, or the other institutional sacraments. Rather, opening the aperture, widening the focus, I see, and wish to make a theologically sound argument for, an analogous sacramental richness – and the materiality, symbol, presence, and transformation this entails – in the world of music. A Way Forward
A study of music’s sacramental potential would be lacking without some explicit reference to actual music as experienced. Because I will argue that the engagement with music is one that affirms and engages the “bodiliness” of the human person, and thus for the importance of the
80 Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2000), 1.
81 Common Preface IV, Roman Missal. Emphasis added.
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sensorial nature of musical experience, each section will include a study in miniature of select musical pieces. These will be discussed in their particularity as a means of illuminating points raised and guarding against an approach that may otherwise become too abstract and lacking in pragmatic truth; unrepresentative of the way human beings really relate to music as an audial phenomenon. While the examples will be drawn from the classical Western tradition, this is a reflection more of the tradition and training of the author than of any suggestion that the arguments I make may be invalid or less true of other world traditions or popular musical genres. I will describe the musical and lyrical content, subject matter, and overall effect of the piece, the circumstances of its creation, and salient features that illuminate certain theological points I wish to raise, including: situation of composition, relation of text and music, harmonic progression, forces, and dynamics. Discussing two or more pieces in conjunction with a particular theme will allow me to draw out similarities and differences and approach the same argument from different angles. This procedure will be a helpful way of applying the more abstract concepts I will raise in the course of this study.
Given the interdisciplinarity of music theology, it is important to acknowledge that a truly equitable balance between the two disciplines is a nebulous, and not always entirely helpful, one to achieve. In my use of musical analysis for the purposes of this study, situated within pastoral theology, I have opted in the main for more programmatic interpretations and analyses of musical examples, in order to be more welcoming of non-music-specialists. While I am convinced that a more thorough-going, deeply musicological and theoretical analysis of the pieces I discuss would no doubt raise up even more insights and questions, my intention in providing the type of analysis I do is merely to begin to illustrate the possibilities of a theologically-informed engagement with music, based upon my model of transformation through a contemplative engagement with beauty, informed by the theological themes being brought to bear in each chapter, and, as I am arguing, the fruits of this engagement in the spiritual life for the Christian musician and the Christian disciple alike.
In Chapter 1, I explore the concept of sacramentality upon which my argument rests. This chapter will introduce and define the notion of sacramentality in the Catholic tradition as the real and tangible yet hidden presence of God dwelling in all things; the perception, apparent to the “Catholic Imagination,” of creation’s being saturated with the Holy. To develop this concept, I
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will draw from Ignatian and Franciscan spirituality, which have in common an attentiveness and reverence for creation. Finally, I will develop the cycle of gift and offering present in the sacramental encounter as meaningful for music with reference to Louis-Marie Chauvet on sacramentality. Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang (String Quartet, no. 15, Third Movement) and Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto, Second Movement are the musical interlocutors for this chapter.
In Chapter 2, I proceed to the theme of incarnation to highlight the ways in which music resonates with this mystery. The Incarnation of the Son, the Resurrection of the Body, and the mystical tradition of the Spiritual Senses (especially as it flourished in medieval Christian mysticism) in relation to music will be three ways of framing the discussion. This will be in an effort to articulate the specific and unique contribution of music – as an acoustic, physical, emotional phenomenon – to a spiritual life integrated with the body, senses, and creation. The music in dialogue will be: James MacMillan’s “Verily I say unto thee” from the Seven Last Words from the Cross and Olivier Messiaen’s “Louange à l’immortalité de Jésus” from the Quatuor pour la fin du temps.
I go on in Chapter 3 to introduce the subject of theological aesthetics and the theme of beauty with regard to music. A discussion of the arts as “mediating beauty” will be grounded primarily in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Richard Viladesau, David Bentley Hart, and Alejandro García-Rivera and offer speculation on music’s particular relationship with beauty as related to joy at the level of being. A discussion of the “Kyrie” and “Et incarnatus est” from Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, and Ēriks Ešenvalds’s Passion and Resurrection (Part IV) and O Salutaris Hostia, will serve as summary and exemplar.
Subsequently, in Chapter 4, I draw a parallel between music and contemplation in the Christian tradition, with particular attention to the theme of listening in von Balthasar’s Prayer. I will suggest, with reference to Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov, that music can serve as a sonic icon, mediating the presence of God in prayer. The aria “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Arvo Pärt’s setting of The Beatitudes will be a suitable accompaniment.
Chapter 5 synthesizes the themes traversed, while arguing that transformation and active service of God and neighbour – fruitfulness – are an imperative trajectory from a sacramental experience
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of God mediated through music. I will posit the pastoral implications of the foregoing: that a loving engagement with the world necessarily follows as the result of an authentic experience of the sacred in music, and that music offers a unique contribution to the life of faith in the balance between contemplation and action. I will argue that a consideration of the person of Mary, the mother of Jesus, provides for us a model of the Christian reception and response to beauty, and relate the Marian experience of God to music. I will draw upon Hildegard of Bingen’s Marian chants O tu suavissima virga and Ave Generosa to lend credence to my claim.
To conclude, I will provide a summary description of the resonances between the contemplative encounter with the divine in faith and the sacramental effect of music through beauty, with reference to Eric Whitacre’s choral piece, i thank you God for most this amazing day, based on a poem by e.e. cummings. I will look ahead at this point to possible implications and future research building on the present study.
A sacramental vision of reality is one in which God’s loving presence is ever close at hand, ready to comfort, challenge, touch, and transform us. Ultimately, such a vision affirms the holiness of all creation, all life, and all relationships, and the potential for the sacred to be manifested in and through all human expression, particularly in the arts. Such a vision is sorely needed in our broken world as a hopeful alternative, which sees God not as distant but intimately involved and available to us in the details of human life, in the joys, sufferings, and moments of exquisite beauty and meaning.
This thesis will argue that music, by its participation in the mystery of creation’s sacramentality, offers unique and holistic experiences for us to meet God. Opening up new spiritual possibilities for the musical experiences which are so ubiquitous in our lives, and which so often profoundly affect us at the core of our humanity, reinforces music (and all art by extension) as a positive force for transformation in the world. In so doing, I hope to offer a pastoral perspective on music that goes beyond the confines of the liturgy alone. I intend to draw attention to music’s unique contribution not only to the formal liturgy of the Church, but also to a more profound spiritual life of the members of the Body of Christ, as a locus of personal and communal encounter with the divine at a profound level, drawing sense and spirit alike into the experience. If musical experiences as listener and as performer are potentially revelatory of the sacred and
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transformative, then music has a part to play in the formation of the Christian into the image of Christ. Music can thus be granted a pastoral value. To listen seriously to music and to perform it are among our most potent ways of learning what it is to live with and before God, learning a service that is a perfect freedom. Noone [sic] and nothing can compel our contemplation, except the object in its own right. In this “obedience” of listening and following, we are stretched and deepened, physically challenged as performers, imaginatively as listeners. The time we have renounced, given up, is given back to us as a time in which we have become more human, more real, even when we can’t say what we have learned, only that we have changed.82
If contemplation is about listening, surrendering, getting in touch with our humanity hidden in Christ, and responding in love with a renewed sense of purpose, then it is music, by inviting us to listen, offering experiences of profound meaning, and integrating body and soul, that can teach us to hear, imagine, and feel more sensitively, deeply, spiritually, and “humanly.” Called by musical beauty towards an encounter with the beautiful Christ, we quiet ourselves in order to receive, and so are empowered to give of ourselves in creative fruitfulness. Music becomes for us a training ground in authentic Christian spirituality and a life lived in generosity and charity for others.
82 Rowan Williams quoted by James MacMillan in “God, Theology and Music,” New Blackfriars 81, 943 (February 2000), 25.
Chapter One: Music and Sacramentality in the Catholic Imagination
O magnum mysterium, et admirabile sacramentum, ut animalia viderent Dominum natum, jacentem in praesepio!1
Sacrament and Sacramentality: Some Preliminaries
“The Lord, your God, is in your midst . . . he will rejoice over you with gladness, he will renew you in his love . . . he will exult over you with loud singing, as on a day of festival” [Zephaniah 3:17]. That mystical image suggests that . . . there is a great range of ways in which God’s presence can be made known through music. Such an understanding is, I believe, best captured by talking about the sacramental role of music.2
In the preceding quotation, David Brown draws upon the prophet Zephaniah’s image of God’s jubilant singing to introduce the notion of God’s presence in music, a presence which he suggests is best understood as sacramental.3 Albert Blackwell4 has also employed the language of sacrament in attempting to deal with “the sacred in music;” or God’s presence being made known through musical means. I propose to follow them in appealing to music’s
1 “O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that animals should see the newborn Lord, lying in a manger!” Matins chant for Christmas Day. 2 David Brown, God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 246. 3 I wish to make a clear distinction between the adjectival use of sacramental (in the sense Brown means it here and I mean it throughout his chapter) and the noun sacramental(s), those observances and devotions practiced by the Church such as the use of holy water, making the sign of the cross, and certain blessings and consecrations, which prepare and dispose us to receive graces. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines these in brief as follows: “Sacramentals are sacred signs instituted by the Church. They prepare [human beings] to receive the fruit of the sacraments and sanctify different circumstances of life.” (1677) Cf. CCC 1667-1679. Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997. Accessed online at
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“sacramentality” by way of accounting theologically for the ways in which music influences the whole human person. I believe that a vital understanding of sacramentality not only refreshes our perspective of God’s presence in our world at large, but also accounts for and expresses the influence music has on both the human body and spirit alike.
If we are to speak of music as sacramental, it is essential that we broaden our understanding of the term to see how it extends beyond the seven sacraments of Catholic tradition (Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Communion, Reconciliation, Marriage, Holy Orders, and the Anointing of the Sick) to embrace a more widespread principle of sacramentality. This principle, the ground in which the seven sacraments are rooted and of which they are its highest expression, is able to encompass diverse kinds of encounters with God mediated through the created world, including, as I will argue, music, in a unique and striking way. While I have no desire to make music an “eighth sacrament” on a par with the seven practiced by the Church, I do wish to suggest some ways in which music might enter into the realm of the sacramental, distinguishing between the specific and general senses of the term. (This task requires a certain precision of language.) That this widened perspective is not a corruption or overextension of the notion of sacrament, I intend first to establish, before turning to a consideration of how music functions in this framework.
Outward Sign of Inward Grace The definition of a “sacrament” which resounds in the minds and ears of many catechism- schooled Catholics may perhaps be something along the lines of the simple formulae “an outward (visible) sign of an inward (invisible) grace;” or, “an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace.”5 These definitions capture the way in which a sacrament brings together the seen and unseen (the Nicene Creed’s visibilium et invisibilium), and the way in which Christ is present in the sacrament as initiator and giver of grace. Essential to the nature of a sacrament is the bestowal of spiritual grace by God through something seen, felt, tasted, heard, even smelled6— through matter, in a way in which the material points to or signifies something about the manner
5 Cf. Catechism of Christian Doctrine (“Penny Catechism”) (1930), 249; Baltimore Catechism (1941), 304. 6 The Roman Catholic liturgy at its best has always engaged the senses. Consider how effective the combination of visual art, architecture, music, word, gesture, fragrant incense and oils, holy water, etc. can be for worship. The very act of gathering as Church is itself “embodied.” The liturgy culminates in the reception of the Holy Eucharist, a holy “tasting” of the transformed elements of bread and wine. See Chapter 2 for a discussion on the relationship of the physical to the spiritual senses in this regard.
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of the particular grace being bestowed.7
David Brown defines the principle of sacramentality in rather broad terms, which nonetheless highlight this mediatory and symbolic role of matter in God’s sacramental bestowal of grace:
[Sacramentality is] “the symbolic mediation of the divine in and through the material”. . . . In a proper sense of the sacramental, the mediation is not purely instrumental; instead the material symbol says something about God in its own right, and so it is an indispensable element in assessing both the immediate experience and any further significance it may have.8
One cannot have a sacrament without some kind of outward sign, available to the senses, that speaks of the grace received in some way. Let us take baptism as an example. The baptismal waters signify not only cleansing and washing, but also the myriad of scriptural water images and their symbolic connotations: the Spirit brooding over the waters in Genesis, the primeval Flood, the parting of the Red Sea, Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan, and the water and blood flowing from the side of the crucified Christ on the cross.9 Water, seen, heard, and felt, gushing and being poured, tells us something about the nature of the grace received by the baptized. In the sacrament of baptism, water is the means by which God both speaks to us and accomplishes a transformation in us through the bestowal of a gift of grace, in this case, cleansing and new life. Our spiritual rebirth is mirrored in a real way through the purifying effects of water. The going down into the “tomb” of the font and the rising again to new life is an outward manifestation of what is taking place within.
The sacraments are in every case spiritually life-giving and sanctifying actions—or as the Catechism of the Catholic Church has it, “masterworks”10—of God, wrought by God for us in
7 CCC 1131: “The sacraments are efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us. The visible rites by which the sacraments are celebrated signify and make present the graces proper to each sacrament. They bear fruit in those who receive them with the required dispositions.” 8 Brown, God and Enchantment of Place, 30. 9 From the Blessing and Invocation of God over Baptismal Water in the Catholic rite: “Father, you give us grace through sacramental signs, which tell us of the wonders of your unseen power. In baptism we use your gift of water, which you have made a rich symbol of the grace you give us in this sacrament. At the very dawn of creation your Spirit breathed on the waters, making them the wellspring of all holiness. The waters of the great flood you made a sign of the waters of baptism, that make an end of sin and a new beginning of goodness. Through the waters of the Red Sea you led Israel out of slavery, to be an image of God’s holy people, set free from sin by baptism. In the waters of the Jordan your Son was baptized by John and anointed with the Spirit. Your Son willed that water and blood should flow from his side as he hung upon the cross.” Rite of Baptism for One Child (1970 Missal). 10 CCC 1116.
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and through matter. The Catechism speaks of the twofold communication of God and humanity through Creation:
God speaks to man through the visible creation. The material cosmos is so presented to man’s intelligence that he can read there traces of its Creator. Light and darkness, wind and fire, water and earth, the tree and its fruit speak of God and symbolize both his greatness and his nearness. Inasmuch as they are creatures, these perceptible realities can become means of expressing the action of God who sanctifies men, and the action of men who offer worship to God.11
Not only does Creation speak of God’s immanence and transcendence, it becomes an instrument by which God sacramentally bestows grace, and likewise, the means by which human beings respond in thankful praise: a twofold sacramental movement.
A Wider Sense of Sacramentality? In an effort to establish a wide meaning of the term for modern use, David Brown argues that a precedent for such usage can be traced back to the early Church. The historical development of the word “sacrament” stands as justification of a variety of meanings beyond reference to the ecclesiastical sacraments exclusively. The word sacramentum from which sacrament is derived originally meant a Roman soldier’s solemn oath of allegiance; the outward enactment of a pledge expressing an interior disposition.12 Imported from a secular context, the word is an early Christian Latin translation of the Greek mysterion (whence the English mystery), referring to something hidden, not fully revealed, or experienced only by the initiated. St. Paul’s usage of the word in the New Testament refers to God’s hidden plan of salvation, made manifest in Christ. After Christ’s ascension, this mysterion or sacramentum takes on a new dimension, becoming tangible in the lived mysteries of the faith. The sacraments then are the Church’s mysteries or “secrets,”13 something hidden now made manifest. The imposition of a new religious meaning onto an existing word meant that the term was not strictly delimited in the first few centuries of the Church. In St. Augustine’s day, Brown tells us, sacrament “had come to mean any
11 CCC 1147-1148. 12 Lizette Larson Miller, Sacramentality Renewed: Contemporary Conversations in Sacramental Theology (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press), 4-5; Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 25. 13 Kristian Depoortere, “From Sacramentality to Sacraments and Vice-Versa” in Contemporary Contours of a God Incarnate (Peeters: Leuven: 2001). Referenced in Larson-Miller, Sacramentality Renewed, 3-4.
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mysterious indwelling that anticipates or points to some greater reality”.14 The Matins chant for Christmas Day that opens this chapter uses the terms mysterium and sacramentum in tandem to refer to the birth of Christ in a stable, observed by animals—the ultimate manifestation of God’s humble dwelling in and amongst material creation.
Given the relatively late development of sacramental theology in the Catholic Church (“well into the second millennium”) and given the wide usage of the term “sacramentum” throughout that period of development, “there is no reason why we should not revive it, provided that we realize what we are doing and distinguish it from the theology of the sacraments narrowly understood.”15 Yet it is not only the historical development of the word that suggests that a wider usage of the term “sacramentality” is indeed valid. I argue that the way in which we perceive God’s dealings with the created cosmos depends on our intuiting of what I call the sacramental principle: God’s presence enlivening and sanctifying creation, and through it, us. When we see sacramentality as the graced meeting place of God and human beings in matter, the lens widens and nothing in creation is excluded from sacramental potentiality. This is Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard’s view, in his The Sacred in Life and Art: it is the “vital conjunction,” the “dynamic interpenetration [of the Divine and nature], which gives birth to the sacred and makes the whole visible universe theological, the matter of a sacrament.” [...] “[E]verything is capable of serving as the object of the sacrament, for everything is intrinsically consecrated and divine— is, in fact, intrinsically, a mysterium.”16 Similarly, Catholic priest Richard P. McBrien applies the term sacramental in its widest sense to “any finite reality through which the divine is perceived to be disclosed and communicated, and through which our human response to the divine assumes some measure of shape, form, and structure.”17 Losing this wider sense as a foundational principle undermines our understanding of sacraments in the narrow sense, as Paul Tillich says: “The largest sense of the term denotes everything in which the Spiritual Presence has been experienced . . . . If the meaning of ‘sacramental’ in the largest sense is disregarded, sacramental
14 Brown, God and Enchantment of Place, 26. 15 Philip Sherry in reference to David Brown’s argument, “The Sacramentality of Things,” New Blackfriars, Volume 89, Issue 1023 (September 2008), 575-590; 588. 16 Philip Sherrard, The Sacred in Life and Art (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1990). Emphasis original. Referenced in Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 27. 17 Richard P. McBrien, Catholicism. 2 vols. (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1980). Referenced in Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 28. Emphasis original.
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activities in the narrower sense (sacramentalia) lose their religious significance”.18
This has much to do, as I have stated, with our concept of God in relation to the world. Lizette Larson-Miller, in her study of contemporary Christian perspectives and developments in sacramental theology, describes sacramentality as an “expansive view of reality” that affirms the Triune God as Creator, who entered (irrevocably) into the world in the Second Person, and desires, through the Third Person, to remain intimately involved in creation: The gap between Creator and created is real, and it is a gap mediated in many ways, but creation, or matter, is essential to this relationship because it is created good by God; it is the fundamental meeting place of humanity and divinity and the medium most helpful to human beings desirous of entering into a participatory relationship in ways more experientially engaging to humanity than nonmatter.19
This last point, is, I believe, important, for it stresses the intelligibility of God’s communication to us in that which is most apparent to us—matter; as well as the sense in which we respond to the presence of God, a point to which I will return.
Christ as Primary Sacrament Another theme I wish to introduce is that of Christ Jesus as primary or primordial sacrament, whose coming into the world is the very foundation of all sacraments.20 God bestows grace through matter in Christ first and foremost; in Christ the created and the divine come together most perfectly. Thus the sacraments are given or instituted by Christ in that they are dependent upon and find their source in His manifestation.
Jesus is the realization, in human form, of the mystery of God’s redemption. Returning to St. Paul’s language of mysterion, Paul G. McPartlan notes that the singular and personal use of the word is instructive in that it refers primarily to Christ, “the mystery in person.” This biblical
18 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951-1963). Referenced in Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 26. The author David Jones expounds the same view. Sherry on David Jones: “He maintained that any understanding of the sacraments depends on a wider sense of sacramentality, which he thought had been lost to a great extent in the modern world” (Sherry, “The Sacramentality of Things,” 579). “Jones’ point [is] that our understanding sacraments in the narrow sense presupposes that we have some wider idea of sacramentality” (Ibid., 589). 19 Larson-Miller, Sacramentality Renewed, “Introduction”, xii. 20 The language describing Christ as a sacrament of God, and the Church as a sacrament of Christ is primarily a twentieth-century phenomenon, Larson-Miller tells us (Sacramentality Renewed, 25-29).
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usage, he argues, should “act as a corrective to the tendency instantly to speak of sacraments, in the plural, and to view them as things.”21 Instead, our usage should carry with it the constant reference back to Christ, the ur-Sacrament.
As sacrament, Christ makes the invisible God visible,22 accomplishes the divine will to save, and bestows divine grace through His human action. Edward Schillebeeckx elaborates: Because the saving acts of the man Jesus are performed by a divine power, they have a divine power to save, but because this divine power to save appears to us in visible form, the saving activity of Jesus is sacramental. For a sacrament is a divine bestowal of salvation in an outwardly perceptible form which makes the bestowal manifest; a bestowal of salvation in historical visibility. . . . The man Jesus, as the personal visible realization of the divine grace of redemption, is the sacrament, the primordial sacrament, because this man, the Son of God himself, is intended by the Father to be in his humanity the only way to the actuality of redemption. . . . Human encounter with Jesus is therefore the sacrament of the encounter with God[.]23
As mediator between God and humanity par excellence, Christ not only imparts God’s grace to human beings, but also, true to the twofold movement of the sacrament, fully and perfectly glorifies God in a human way. Schillebeeckx goes on:
Christ’s love for [humanity] thus manifests God’s love for [human beings] by actually bestowing it; it is the redeeming mercy of God himself coming to meet us in a human heart. But as well as this movement down from above, coming to us from God’s love by way of Jesus’ human heart, there is in the man Jesus also a movement up from below, from the human heart of Jesus, the Son, to the Father.24
United with Christ in His humanity, we receive grace as God’s self-gift and return praise as our own self-gift to the Godhead, all through Christ’s own offering of Himself to us and to the Father.25
21 Paul G. McPartlan, “Catholic Perspectives on Sacramentality.” Asian Christian Review. Vol. 1, No. 3 (Winter 2007) 76-97; 80. The author is referring to Michael Schmaus, The Church as Sacrament (London: Sheed and Ward, 1975). 22 Cf. “He is the image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15); “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). 23 Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P. Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter With God (Lanham: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 15. 24 Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter With God, 17. 25 See the section on L.M. Chauvet and symbolic exchange (“The Sacramental Cycle”) below.
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Schillebeeckx and others refer to the Church as a foundational sacrament; in this case, the sacrament of Christ. While Christ sacramentally mediates the Trinity, the Church mediates Christ’s presence both in her liturgical action and in works of mercy and evangelisation. Paul McPartlan quotes Henri de Lubac in this regard: “If Christ is the sacrament of God, the Church is for us the sacrament of Christ; she represents him in the full and ancient meaning of the term; she really makes him present.”26 Inasmuch as the Church is the locus of Christian sacraments, she is also a primary source for the mediation of sacramental grace in containing and vitalising the sacraments. Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann, identifies a similar understanding in For the Life of the World: “The church is the sacrament of the kingdom—not because she possesses divinely instituted acts called ‘sacraments,’ but because first of all she is the possibility given to man to see in and through this world the ‘world to come,’ to see and to ‘live’ it in Christ.”27 It is instructive to note Schmemann’s emphasis on the importance of the Church’s sacramental role, not so much in delivering the liturgical sacraments as in providing by her existence a foundation for the very notion of the sacramental, which he defines here as seeing and living “the world to come” in this world – a mysterious tension that characterizes Christian life.
Music as Mediator of Body and Spirit, Symbol of Grace, and Locus of Presence So far we have rehearsed various shades of meaning of the term “sacrament.” Let us now consider some preliminary applications of these ideas to music before moving on.
First, the sacramental brings together heaven and earth in that invisible, spiritual graces are bestowed through an outward, tangible form. So too, music allows for the coming together of matter/body and spirit (or the exterior and the interior) by its very makeup. George Steiner recognizes this: “Music is at once cerebral in the highest degree . . . . and it is at the same time somatic, carnal and a searching out of resonances in our bodies”.28 On the one hand, we have its effect on our physical bodies—heart rate, breath, bodies in movement and dance, the physical coordination required to sing and play an instrument, the connection to other human beings with
26 Henri de Lubac, Catholicism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988). Referenced in McPartlan, “Catholic Perspectives on Sacramentality,” 76. 27 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982). Referenced in Larson-Miller, Sacramentality Renewed, 28. 28 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 217.
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whom one is making music, and so on. On the other, we have its intellectual and spiritual effects—music’s strong and even mysterious relationship to memory, emotion, and mood (does it represent, evoke, or influence?); its ability to carry transcendent meanings, its esoteric mystical-mathematical dimension; its transience and invisibility; and its ties to praise – a “spiritual sacrifice”.
Second, a sacrament employs the language of symbol, communicating something about the nature of the grace it simultaneously symbolizes and bestows. In an analogous manner, music functions as a symbol of God’s generosity that bestows the generous grace that it symbolizes. Music is sheer gift. James Lancelot argues that music reveals the lavish generosity of God as it does not seem to be a part of creation critical to our biological survival: “Surely it is a powerful symbol of a Creator whose love overflows, for it seems to have been given to us purely for the worship of God and for our own delight and comfort.”29 In Lancelot’s paradigm, we have the coming together of the symbol of God’s generous love with human musicality: “[Music] combines a powerful symbol of God’s love (creation of music and indeed of the human voice) with human creative skill (in finding out tunes and in making musical instruments).”30
Further, the performative and enacted nature of music means that each performance is a unique and fresh experience unto itself, wherein new graces may be found. David Brown compares this to the kind of “re-presentation” that takes place in the liturgy: “Music is not simply an intellectual exercise, nor an experience confined to the composer alone. It is so designed that, as with the eucharist, the original experience can be re-enacted as God’s presence in our midst once more made known.”31 The parallel Brown draws here hinges on the unified nature of the original experience of the Apostles at the Last Supper and the experience of Christians each time they gather at the table of the Eucharist. The liturgical memorial “re-enactment” of Christ’s gift of Himself in the Last Supper makes Christ present again. Just so, each performance of a piece of music is a “re-enactment” of a kind, which unites those who participate in it across barriers of time and space, and which makes graces available to them afresh.
29 James Lancelot, “Music as a Sacrament,” The Sense of the Sacramental: Movement and Measure in Art and Music, Place and Time. David Brown and Ann Loades, eds. (London: SPCK, 1995),180. Brown also speaks in terms of God’s generosity in being available and present to creation; God and Enchantment of Place, 8. 30 Lancelot, “Music as a Sacrament,” 181. 31 Brown, God and Grace of Body, 247.
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Next, the sacraments are conduits of grace, places where God dwells, occasions to encounter the presence of God. As was mentioned earlier in this chapter, we have the notion of the presence of God in music, whether by virtue of its beauty, its artfulness, its relation to number, or its unifying of body and spirit. Beyond music as emblematic, as diaconal, as grace-filled, and as gift, all roles which he believes music services, Albert Blackwell dares to go further: “I believe that music offers divine epiphany, real presence, and for this reason I prefer the adjective ‘sacramental.’”32 Blackwell suggests two streams or traditions to help flesh this out: the Pythagorean (i.e., music as tied to intellect as symbolic of the order of the universe) and Incarnational (i.e., music as tied to body and its acoustic, sonic reality).
George Steiner’s Real Presences33 helps to bolster this claim. In it, the author argues for the “real presence” of God in artful human communication (including music), sustaining it and imbuing it with the possibility of expressing something transcendent. By virtue of this dynamic, Steiner argues that all art has a religious reference. This reference to a transcendent dimension he closely identifies with the capabilities of music, which he sees as brimming with meanings: It is in and through music that we are most immediately in the presence of the logically, of the verbally inexpressible but wholly palpable energy in being that communicates to our senses and to our reflection what little we can grasp of the naked wonder of life. I take music to be the naming of the naming of life. This is, beyond any liturgical or theological specificity, a sacramental motion.34
That is, music offers the vital experience of pre-cognitive or -verbal sense of the holiness of being alive, the real presence of the transcendent God apparent to our whole being before it comes to be named, categorized, or interpreted. In this vein, Russell Re Manning calls music “the unwritten theology that first articulates the real presence of transcendence to humanity.”35
32 Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 29. 33 Steiner: “[This essay] proposes that any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs, that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by God’s presence. I will put forward the argument that the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of musical form, infers the necessary possibility of this ‘real presence’” (3). 34 Steiner, Real Presences, 217. 35 Russell Re Manning, “Chapter 5: Unwritten Theology: Notes Towards a Natural Theology of Music,” Music and Transcendence, Férdia J. Stone-Davis, ed. (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015, [65-73]): 71.
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As a further witness, French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil36 (1909-1943) provides us with a perspective of the beauty of the world as an indicator of God’s presence, locus of encounter with the divine, and thus a sacrament. The beauty of the world is the co-operation of divine wisdom in creation. . . . [The] perfecting [of all things] is the creation of beauty. God created the universe and his Son, our first-born brother, created the beauty of it for us. The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really present in the universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the universe. It also is like a sacrament.37
Our love of beauty, says Weil, has been implanted in our souls by God that we might seek it, desire it, and in doing so, encounter God, who also loves the beauty of creation. It is a meeting place of sorts, a way to God through creation provided for by God, our Lover and Creator: [T]he beauty of the world is the commonest, easiest and most natural way of approach. Just as God hastens into every soul immediately it opens, even a little, in order through it to love and serve the afflicted, so he descends in all haste to love and admire the tangible beauty of his own creation through the soul that opens to him. But the contrary is still more true. The soul’s natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from on high.38
Finally, Weil likens beauty in the universe to the incarnation, and again ties this to sacrament:
Of all the attributes of God, only one is incarnated in the universe, in the
36 Blackwell, Steiner, and Patrick Sherry (“The Sacramentality of Things”) all refer to Weil in the course of their arguments. Weil never became Roman Catholic, although she professed a deep love for God and Christ as revealed in Catholicism. She felt that she was unworthy of baptism, and that it was God’s will that she be in solidarity with those outside the Church. In her own words: “I love God, Christ and the Catholic faith as much as it is possible for so miserably inadequate a creature to love them. . . . I love the Saints . . . I love the Catholic liturgy, hymns, architecture, rites and ceremonies. But I have not the slightest love for the Church in the strict sense of the word, apart from its relation to all these things that I do love” (Simone Weil, Waiting on God, Emma Craufurt, trans. London: Collins, 1973;19). “I think that only those who are above a certain level of spirituality can participate in the sacraments as such. For as long as those who are below this level have not reached it, whatever they may do, they cannot be strictly said to belong to the Church. As far as I am concerned, I think I am below this level. This is why . . . I consider myself to be unworthy of the sacraments” (Waiting on God, 16). “It seems to me that the will of God is that I should not enter the Church at present. . . . And yet I was filled with a very great joy when you said the thoughts which I confided to you were not incompatible with membership of the Church, and that, in consequence, I was not outside it in spirit. I cannot help still wondering whether in these days when so large a proportion of humanity is sunk in materialism, God does not want there to be some men and women who have given themselves to him and to Christ and who yet remain outside the Church. . . . nothing gives me more pain than the idea of separating myself from the immense and unfortunate multitude of unbelievers. I have the essential need, and I think I can say the vocation, to move among men of every class and complexion, mixing with them and sharing their life and outlook, so far that is to say as conscience allows” (Waiting on God 17). 37 Weil, Waiting on God, 120. 38 Weil, Waiting on God, 118.
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body of the Word; it is beauty. . . . The presence of beauty in the world is the experimental proof of the possibility of the incarnation. When joy is a total and pure adherence of the soul to the beauty of the world, it is a sacrament (the sacrament of St. Francis).39
Such an association of beauty with sacrament, with God’s incarnate presence, and the joy of that encounter, allows us to affirm the potential of God’s presence in beauty as refracted through the arts. The result of the perception of God’s presence—God’s self-gift—in music is, of course, a potentially transformative grace, in that it allows us to see with new eyes and hear with new ears, be refreshed by such an encounter, and allow God’s grace mediated through musical means, to challenge and heal our spiritual blindness and deafness; to shape, form, and sanctify us.
“Charged with the Grandeur of God”: Creation and Incarnation as Foundational for Sacramentality
In this section, I wish to touch upon themes to which we will return in more depth in the following chapters. I mention them now in my argument so as to provide support for a broad definition of the sacramental, one that I believe extends in an especially fitting way to music.
The Sacramental Imagination: An “Enchanted” View of Reality The readiness to see God dwelling in the things of creation—nature, our relationships, the arts— may be called the sacramental imagination. Andrew Greeley associates it with cultural Catholicism, calling it a “pervasive religious sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. . . . This special Catholic imagination can appropriately be called sacramental. It sees created reality as a ‘sacrament,’ that is, a revelation of the presence of God.”40 Greeley draws this notion from David Tracy’s The Analogical Imagination,41 where Tracy suggests the strategy of a theological-analogical imagination as the way to approach the
39 Weil, “New York Notebook,” First and Last Notebooks, Richard Rees, trans. (London; New York: Oxford University Press), 83. Her reference to St. Francis reveals her fascination with the saint and her association of his way of life with beauty: “The example of Saint Francis shows how great a place the beauty of the world can have in Christian thought. Not only is his actual poem perfect poetry, but all his life was perfect poetry in action. His very choice of places for solitary retreats or for the foundations of his convents was in itself the most beautiful poetry in action. Vagabondage and poverty were poetry with him; he stripped himself naked in order to have immediate contact with the beauty of the world.” (Waiting on God, 116) 40 Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (California: University of California Press, 2000), 1. 41 David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroads, 1982).
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challenge and promise of pluralism, and in particular, how to communicate Christian symbols in a pluralistic culture.42 Symbols function on the basis of analogy. Tracy defines analogy as “a language of ordered relationships articulating similarity-in-difference. The order among the relationships is constituted by the distinct but similar relationships of each analogue to some primary focal meaning, some prime analogue.”43 When applied to Christian theology, that primary analogue is Christ, by whom all symbols receive meaning, and by extension, all reality is ordered in relation to Him. “In Christian systematics, the primary focal meaning will be the event of Jesus Christ,” says Tracy. “That focal meaning as event will prove the primary analogue for the interpretation of the whole of reality. The event will prove the major clue to the similarities-in-difference awaiting explanation among the realities God, self, other selves and world (society, history, nature).”44 The analogical imagination of the Christian sees all things fitting into the pattern and paradigm of Christ. The grace given in Christ is “the central clue to the nature of all reality.”45 “By concentrating attention upon that focal meaning, the always- already, not-yet event of Jesus Christ, Christian theologians develop ordered relationships for the whole of reality.”46 This gives way to a sacramental vision of reality, as Tracy describes with reference to the Franciscan worldview: [T]he radical sense of ‘likenesses’ in the gifted variety of the ordinary joins a sense for an intensity negating the ‘profane’ and the everyday in the paradigmatic to yield, as in Bonaventure and Teilhard de Chardin, theologies empowered by a vision of a recognition of ‘a coincidence of opposites.’ All reality is now understood theologically in Bonaventure as it was religiously experienced in Francis: The entire world, the ordinary in all its variety, is now theologically envisioned as a sacrament—a sacrament emanating from Jesus Christ as the paradigmatic sacrament of God, the paradigmatic clue to humanity and nature alike.47
In Greeley’s application of Tracy’s ideas, the analogical (or “sacramental”) imagination looks for resonances between God and creation, ways of knowing God and enjoying God’s presence through the created order. Such a view emphasizes the “metaphorical nature of creation. . . . Everything in creation, from the exploding cosmos to the whirling, dancing, and utterly
42 Ibid., xii. 43 Ibid., 408. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 430. 46 Ibid., 429. 47 Ibid., 413.
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mysterious quantum particles, discloses something about God and, in so doing, brings God among us.”48
Both David Brown and Andrew Greeley use the word “enchantment” when referring to a sacramental vision of creation. In the sense in which they employ it, “enchantment” indicates an awareness or sense that the objects and places that we encounter, and the endeavours, relationships, and experiences that form our ordinary quotidian lives, are “permeated by, dense in, awash with”49 underlying spiritual or mystical meanings. Those who view reality as enchanted begin to perceive a deeper level of coherence beneath the seemingly random or surface level occurrences of daily life; eyes and ears attentive to the mystery to which all things in God’s world might become referents or portals. While demystification rules the day in our secularized, post-modern society, the corrective, for Greeley, is a re-engagement with enchantment, at the heart of the way the “Catholic Imagination” perceives reality. Likewise, Brown, in his three part project,50 argues for the recovery of enchantment (“the potential re- enchantment of the world”) by reinvigorating a widespread sense of the sacramental, the presence of the divine enlivening all aspects of the world, so that largely neglected areas of human experience might also be recovered as of interest to theology and spirituality.51 He even argues that the sacramental is not the exclusive province of Christianity, but should instead be viewed as “a major, and perhaps even the primary, way of exploring God's relationship to our world.”52 Because of God’s immense generosity, Brown argues, we can and should expect to find God “at work everywhere and in such a way that all human beings could not only respond to him, however implicitly, but also develop insights from which even Christians could learn”.53
Yet Brown, a champion of music as a form of natural theology (i.e., knowledge of God discernable apart from supernatural revelation such as Scripture), seems to go a little too far in envisioning sacramentality “escaping” from the grasp of the Church, extending beyond the purview of the Christian worldview. While I share the conviction that the sacramental is a mode
48 Ibid., 6-7. 49 Greeley, 2. 50 God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (2004); God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (2007); God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama (2008). 51 Brown, God and Enchantment of Place, 10. 52 Ibid., 8. 53 Ibid. Acknowledging that many theologians may be tentative about extending the notion of sacramentality so far, Brown nevertheless rejects the idea that this will necessarily lead to “a diminution of Christian conviction.” (ibid.)
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of understanding God’s self-manifestation to us especially characteristic of the human-divine encounter, I am uneasy about removing sacramentality from its context at the heart of the Christian experience of God. Nor would I wish to impose the term onto other religious worldviews unduly. Sacramentality not only finds its birthplace in Christian tradition, it is inseparable from it and, I would argue, essential to it. Although I acknowledge and celebrate God’s limitless generosity and prerogative to bestow grace and self-revelation wherever and however God will, because my lens is Christian, I recognize Christ above all as the ultimate and complete self-gift and manifestation of God, the paradigmatic Sacrament, the source of all that we may call sacramental.
For the Christian, the world may be viewed as sacramental or “enchanted”—rich in the presence of God—because of, in, and through Christ. The whole principle of sacramentality is necessarily underwritten by the fact of the Incarnation as the “root of the sacramental principle”.54 We saw above that Christ, as the fulfillment of God’s intention to bestow saving grace, is the first and ultimate Sacrament. So too does the sacramentality of the world rely upon Christ’s incarnation. Creation has coherence because of Christ, in, through, and for whom it came into being.55 Christ is the “primary focal meaning” or “analogue” for the Christian analogical imagination, which allows one to see all reality as laden with meaning. Lizette Larson-Miller points to the recent tendency in the work of several scholars, such as Elizabeth Johnson and Ilia Delio, to stress the cosmic significance of Christ’s incarnation. The term “Deep Incarnation” refers to the fact that, in Christ’s becoming human and taking on sarx—flesh; the stuff of creation—God in Christ is related to everything else in the cosmos.56
Such ideas about the relationship between God and creatures, and the possibility of gaining knowledge of God through contemplation of creation, have a foothold in the thought of the Church Fathers. Hans Urs von Balthasar, writing on Maximus the Confessor, highlights his acceptance of “the natural world, contemplated in the light of revelation, as a source of wisdom. Perfect knowledge—the knowledge of the believing Christian and even the knowledge of the
54 Larson-Miller, Sacramentality Renewed, 39. 55 Col. 16-17: “For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” 56 Larson-Miller, Sacramentality Renewed, 50-54. The term was coined by Niels Henrik Gregersen. Many of these ideas echo Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on cosmology and “Christogenesis.”
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mystic—is gleaned from both ‘books’ [i.e. Scripture and nature] together. The ‘contemplation of nature’ . . . and of the structures of meaning . . . hidden within it, structures that are part of every single being, becomes for Maximus a necessary step, a kind of initiation, into the knowledge of God.”57 Balthasar quotes Maximus directly on the paradox that the relationship of all things in the cosmos to the Creator both unites them and distinguishes them: The heart of this relationship [between God and all things] is that there is one universal presence . . . of the cause of all that is, secretly and unrecognizably binding all things together, yet dwelling in each being in a different way; this presence holds the individual parts of the whole together, in itself and in each other, unconfused and inseparable, and allows them, through this very relationship of creative unity, to live more for each other than for themselves.58
As the One who is in relationship with all created things and so unites all things, God, who is Love, is intimately near to all created things. As a way of conceptualizing God’s presence in creation while avoiding radical pantheism or animism (which equate creation with the divine), Albert Blackwell (arguing that such a move opens up possibilities for music) advises a move towards panentheism, a theological concept that holds in tension the immanence and transcendence of God. Panentheism imagines the cosmos as existing within God, enveloped, supported, and sustained like a child in its mother’s womb. God is thus radically present everywhere in creation, in diverse ways, but the world does not exhaust God’s being, for God is infinitely more than creation.59
Franciscan and Ignatian Voices God’s desire not to “remain aloof” from creation but to dwell among us imbues creation with a prevailing sacramentality of its own, through God’s grace.60 Furthermore, the Christian tradition of seeing creation as God’s “second book” affirms that, just as God has offered self-revelation through sacred scripture, so does God continue to do so through the natural world. The doctrine of the imago Dei might be interpreted to mean that amongst all creation, God dwells in a particular way in the human being.61 The contemplation of God’s magnificent creation—both the
57 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Brian E. Daley, S.J., trans. (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 61. 58 Ibid., 69-70; a reference to Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogia,7; PG 91, 685AB. 59 Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 35-37. 60 Cf. Mark Chapman, in Larson-Miller, Sacramentality Renewed, 50. 61 Cf. Brown, God and Enchantment of Place, 33.
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natural world and the human being—reveals something about the One whose handiwork it is. Creation acts a mediator of the divine, becoming for the Christian a mirror into which one can gaze, there to find God’s reflection. To find support for this sacramental view of creation, we can turn to Franciscan and Ignatian creation spirituality.
Francis of Assisi’s (1181/2-1226) “Canticle of Creatures,” a work composed by the saint towards the end of his life, when he was gravely ill and nearly blind, represents the fruits of a lifetime of attending to God’s presence in nature, and of conversion to this all-encompassing vision and compassionate way of relating to the world: Most High, all-powerful, all-good Lord, All praise is Yours, all glory, honor and blessings. To you alone, Most High, do they belong; no mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your Name.
We praise You, Lord, for all Your creatures, especially for Brother Sun, who is the day through whom You give us light. And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor, of You Most High, he bears your likeness.
We praise You, Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars, in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair.
We praise You, Lord, for Brothers Wind and Air, fair and stormy, all weather's moods, by which You cherish all that You have made.
We praise You, Lord, for Sister Water, so useful, humble, precious and pure.
We praise You, Lord, for Brother Fire, through whom You light the night. He is beautiful, playful, robust, and strong.
We praise You, Lord, for Sister Earth, who sustains us with her fruits, colored flowers, and herbs.
We praise You, Lord, for those who pardon, for love of You bear sickness and trial. Blessed are those who endure in peace, by You Most High, they will be crowned.
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We praise You, Lord, for Sister Death, from whom no-one living can escape. Woe to those who die in their sins! Blessed are those that She finds doing Your Will. No second death can do them harm.
We praise and bless You, Lord, and give You thanks, and serve You in all humility.62
Francis’s affirmation of creation is deeply felt as fraternal love for “Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon,” “Brother Fire,” “Sister Mother Earth,” and all those wonderful elements of creation which both reveal attributes of God to us and for, with, and through whom (all possible renderings of the Italian “per”) God is glorified and praised. “Sister Bodily Death” is also included, evidence of Francis’s embrace of all of human experience as graced with God’s presence. In particular, Francis’s deep concern for the poor and downtrodden, in his love for the poor Christ, reveals that he recognized Christ’s sacramental presence in the humble and lowly. Ilia Delio, O.S.F writes of this joyful, Spirit-infused vision, which comes across so clearly in Francis’s “Canticle”: Francis’s nature mysticism included a consciousness of God, with appropriate religious attitudes of awe and gratitude. His joyful attitude toward creation was a far cry from Neoplatonic speculative mysticism, which focused on an abstract cosmological structure. Rather, he took spontaneous joy in the material world, singing its praises like a troubadour poet. With a disarming sense of immediacy, he felt himself part of the family of creation.63
Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1221-1274) uses the image of a mirror to speak about the natural world, through which the goodness, beauty, and wisdom of the Creator is manifest. Moved by St. Francis’s recognition of the integral relationship between God and all creation, Bonaventure affirms all creatures as “shadows, echoes and pictures . . . vestiges, representations, spectacles proposed to us and signs divinely given so that we can see God”.64 Ilia Delio speaks of the Franciscan sacramental view of creation as exemplified in Bonaventure:
62 Translator unknown. Public domain text accessed online at
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Bonaventure views the world as sacramental—a symbolic world full of signs of God’s presence. The world is created as a means of God’s self- revelation so that, like a mirror or footprint, it might lead us to love and praise the Creator. . . . The world is a sign and is meant to lead humans to what it signifies, namely, the infinite Trinity of dynamic, eternal and self- diffusive love.65
To take a further example, we can see the sacramental Franciscan worldview evident in Angela of Foligno, medieval mystic and Franciscan tertiary (1248-1309). Angela describes, in a manner characteristic of her intense and fiery mysticism, a revelation she experienced of God’s power filling creation: While the Mass was being sung . . . [I] heard God speaking to [me] with words that were so sweet that [my] soul was immediately and totally restored. What he told [me] was “My daughter, you are sweet to me” . . . “I want to show you something of my power.” And immediately the eyes of my soul were opened, and in a vision I beheld the fullness of God in which I beheld and comprehended the whole of creation, that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss, the sea itself, and everything else. And in everything that I saw, I could perceive nothing except the presence of the power of God, and in a manner totally indescribable. And my soul in an excess of wonder cried out: “The world is pregnant with God!” Wherefore I understood how small is the whole of creation—that is, what is on this side and what is beyond the sea, the abyss, the sea itself, and everything else—but the power of God fills it all to overflowing.66
This expansive cosmic vision, and Angela’s cry, “The world is pregnant with God!” inspires a powerful image of creation teeming with the promise of fullness of life in God’s reign, waiting to break forth. It brings to mind Paul’s words to the Romans, “For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. . . . We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”67
Ilia Delio identifies five major themes in Franciscan creation theology, which we summarize here: 1. The goodness of creation: Creation comes into being through infinite goodness and love
65 Delio, A Franciscan View of Creation, 29. 66 Angela of Foligno, Complete Works. Paul Lachance, trans. (New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1993), 169-170. 67 Romans 8:19, 22; NIV. The theology of Julian of Norwich (Revelation of Love) echoes this theme: c.f. her emphasis on God’s “rightfulness” – that God is in all things and does all things (chapters 11, 26); her vision of God “in a point” (11); her image of creation as a tiny round ball (like a hazelnut) in the palm of God’s hand – made, loved, and kept forever (5); and Christ as our Mother (57). See Revelation of Love, John Skinner, tr. and ed. (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, Image Books, 1996).
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of God. 2. The integral relationship between Christ and creation: Becoming immersed in Christ allows us to share Christ’s intimate, fraternal relationship with creation. 3. The sacramentality of creation: Creation enjoys an intimate relationship to the Divine Creator, to Whom it is oriented as its source and goal. 4. The integral relationship between the human and the non-human aspects of creation: The richness and harmonious diversity of creation is based on and reflects the richness of the mystery of God’s generous love. 5. The universe as a divine milieu with Christ as center: The Incarnation involves and implicates the entire created order, revealing Christ to be the universe’s purpose and goal.68
The Ignatian spiritual tradition, with its key affirmation of “finding God in all things,” bolsters and reinforces the Franciscan view of creation. No area of life is unworthy of theological reflection; God can and does reveal Godself in surprising ways in all aspects of life: relationships, events, nature, and culture.
M. Dennis Hamm, S.J. highlights the Spiritual Exercises69 as a source for gleaning a sense of the Ignatian view of creation.70 He points out that a prime example of the Ignatian worldview can be found in the “Contemplation to Attain the Love of God” (230-237).71 The final Contemplation of the Exercises, it sets out a course of prayerful reflection with the aim of disposing one to ask for interior knowledge of the manifold gifts the individual has received from God, so that, “filled with gratitude for all, I may in all things love and serve the Divine Majesty” (SpEx, 233).72
68 Delio, A Franciscan View of Creation, 41-43. 69 “As a manual to be used by a director working one-on-one with a retreatant, this text presumes a vision of the relationship between God, humanity, and the world that comes out of a worldview shared among educated Catholic Europeans of the early sixteenth century. When, therefore, we look for Ignatius’ view of creation in this text, we find it simplified, not spelled out. In the Exercises the writer is not teaching about Creator and creation; he is working with that shared doctrine in a project that intends to help a retreatant make important decisions within the context of that shared faith vision. In other words, the implied reader of the Exercises, the director, knows the Thomistic synthesis regarding creation, to which Ignatius can allude without needing to spell it out.” (M. Dennis Hamm, S.J. “Reading Hopkins after Hubble: The Durability of Ignatian Creation Spirituality.” Horizons 41 (College Theological Society, 2014): 275-295. 70 M. Dennis Hamm, S.J. “Reading Hopkins after Hubble,” 288-293. 71 God’s love for us is given – it is our love for God that is referred to here. 72 References to the Spiritual Exercises (SpEx) in this section will be parenthetical. The English translation is by Louis J. Puhl, S.J. (1951), accessed online at
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In the first point, Ignatius invites the exerciant to reflect upon his or her own personal life story: the blessings and “special favors I have received” – one’s creation, redemption, and God’s desire to give God’s very self in Jesus. Then one reflects on what one ought to offer God – “namely, all my possessions, and myself along with them” – and so an offering of all of this is made in the form of the “Suscipe” prayer: “Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess . . .” (SpEx, 234).
The second point moves to a wider perspective which “contextualizes the personal within the cosmic”73: “This is to reflect how God dwells in creatures: in the elements giving them existence, in the plants giving them life, in the animals conferring upon them sensation, in man bestowing understanding. So He dwells in me and gives me being, life, sensation, intelligence; and makes a temple of me, since I am created in the likeness and image of the Divine Majesty” (SpEx, 235).
In the third point, the retreatant concentrates on the way divine love continues to be tirelessly at work in sustaining creation, and inviting a response of love: “This is to consider how God works and labors for me in all creatures upon the face of the earth, that is, He conducts Himself as one who labors. Thus, in the heavens, the elements, the plants, the fruits, the cattle, etc., He gives being, conserves them, confers life and sensation, etc.” (SpEx, 236).
Finally, in the fourth point, the retreatant meditates on the lavish generosity of God’s love, envisioning all of these good gifts coming down from God as the source of all goodness: “This is to consider all blessings and gifts as descending from above. Thus, my limited power comes from the supreme and infinite power above, and so, too, justice, goodness, mercy, etc., descend from above as the rays of light descend from the sun, and as the waters flow from their fountains, etc.” (SpEx, 237).
In this final Exercise, we recognize the Ignatian emphasis on God’s boundless love and generosity. Such love, as is the aim of the Exercise, invites a response of one’s self. In this sacramental worldview, God’s presence, through God’s lavish gifts of grace, is seen as enlivening every aspect of human life and all creation, and bringing itself to bear directly on the life of the individual.
73 M. Dennis Hamm, S.J. “Reading Hopkins after Hubble,” 290.
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This sensibility is given a stunningly poetic voice in the works of Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). The quotation that forms this section’s heading is taken from Hopkins’s poem, “God’s Grandeur,” a powerful piece that speaks (I should say rather, “sings”) of the presence of the Spirit in creation, despite the apparent separation from God and the despoiling of the natural world by human beings. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.74
The promise of the “dearest freshness deep down things” ensures that the sanctity and holy beauty of creation is vouchsafed by God’s care. The Spirit is imaged in feminine terms, “brooding” over the world “with warm breast / and with ah! bright wings”—the presence of the life-giving God ever intimate, inexhaustible. “Hopkins’ younger Jesuit colleague George Tyrrell,” Philip Sherry points out, “referred to the idea that the spiritual can be conveyed through the material as ‘the sacramental principle’”75—a principle very much alive in Hopkins’s vibrant and remarkable poetry, a vision enhanced by his Jesuit formation.76
A sacramental view of creation, of the order which we are discussing, enables us to affirm the possibility of a graced encounter with God in Jesus, in and through, and not in spite of, the things of this world. It is worth noting that such a vision, sorely needed in the circumstances our world
74 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur” and Other Poems (New York: Dover, 1995),15. 75 Sherry, “The Sacramentality of Things,” 577. 76 Cf. especially “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” and “Pied Beauty.” I agree with M. Dennis Hamm’s assessment of the effect of Ignatian formation on Hopkins’s poetry: “The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins already demonstrated a special sensitivity to nature as a young Anglican. But his conversion to Catholicism, followed by his formation as a Jesuit, nurtured a creation spirituality that moved him from the rather cold view of the cosmos typical of his Victorian era to a vibrant sense of God intimately revealed in nature.” (M. Dennis Hamm, S.J. “Reading Hopkins after Hubble: The Durability of Ignatian Creation Spirituality,” 275).
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finds itself in today, is key to the compassionate reconciliation between peoples, a refocusing of our priorities to the care and concern for the most vulnerable, and a reclaiming of proper stewardship of creation. We need look no further than Pope Francis77 to see the fusion of Franciscan and Ignatian ideas about creation’s sacramentality. This worldview is instrumental to his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, where he speaks out of concern for a suffering planet, and the powerful call to a reorientation of the value of this world reframed through reference to the radical presence of the Triune God in creation.
The Sacramental Cycle: Self-Gift and Symbolic Exchange in Music
I have argued for the sacramental potentiality of all creation, substantiating my argument using traditional definitions of sacramentality, trends towards a broadening definition of the sacramental, and insights from the spiritual tradition of Western Christianity. I would like now to examine the sacramental movement itself—God’s bestowal of grace as gift and the human response. My contention is that the dynamic of gift/reception/return-gift that occurs in the sacraments works in an analogous way to the sacramental movement at work in musical experiences.
I have already alluded to the “twofold movement” that the sacraments allow for—God’s extension of the hand to us, so to speak, and our reaching out (in itself provided for by grace) to take that extended hand. This necessarily takes place in matter, since, as Richard P. McBrien says:
There is no finite instrument that God cannot put to use. On the other hand, we humans have nothing else apart from finite instruments to express our own response to God’s self-communication. Just as the divine reaches us through the finite, so we reach the divine through the finite. The point at which this ‘divine commerce’ occurs is the point of sacramental encounter.78
The sum of the sacramental encounter, God’s addressing us and our response to God, is the work of the divine initiative.
77 The present Pope is a Jesuit whose admiration for and devotion to St. Francis is evident in the taking of his name and the naming of the 2015 encyclical (Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home) after the first words of the “Canticle of Creatures.” The reality of Franciscan poverty is also common to Ignatius and Pope Francis. 78 McBrien, Catholicism; referenced in Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 28.
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Edward J. Kilmartin, S.J. has stressed the twofold movement, “from above,” and “from below,” in terms applied to the liturgy, in his systematic theology of the Eucharistic sacrifice. He uses the terms katabatic and anabatic to express the mutual self-offering79 that occurs in the Eucharist: The comprehensive shape of meaning of the Eucharist reflects the fact that the Eucharist constitutes the central self-realization of the Church of Jesus Christ that occurs at the level of liturgical action. For this celebration has a katabatic-anabatic basic structure in and through which God and people are bound together. This binding happens through the actualization of the covenant relationship in which the (katabatic) self-gift of the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit to human beings finds the faith response of the (anabatic) self-gift of human beings through Christ in the Holy Spirit to the Father.80
With the insight of this twofold, relational movement in mind, let us touch upon the sacramental theology of Louis Marie Chauvet in his significant work, Symbol and Sacrament.81 For Chauvet, a proper understanding of sacramental grace necessarily carries with it an affirmation of the body as “the place of God,” that place where God speaks in the language of symbol. It demands a belief in the God who, having chosen to express the mystery of Godself to humanity by becoming incarnate in Jesus, continues to “take flesh in the world and in history” and “to come into human corporality.”82 The body is understood as the “arch-symbol” that knits together tradition, society, and the universe. The sacraments are the “exemplary symbolic ‘expression[s]’” of God’s action to raise up children, brothers and sisters of Christ.83 The theology Chauvet suggests bases itself upon the sacraments as “symbolic figures allowing us entrance into, and empowerment to live out, the (arch-)sacramentality which is the very essence of Christian existence.”84
79 I do not mean to suggest that our self-offering is on par with Christ’s; rather that the reception of the precious gift of Christ in the Eucharist stirs us to a return-gift of ourselves in love, however imperfect such a gift (or our giving of it) may be. 80 Edward J. Kilmartin, S.J. The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology. Ed. Robert J. Daly, S.J. (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1998), 341. 81 Louis Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence. Patrick Madigan, S.J. and Madeleine Beaumont, trans. (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 1995). The beauty of Chauvet’s work, says Bruce Morrill, emerges in his “arguments for the corporality of our redemption in Christ, the particularity of that divine Word as the Spirit writes it on the universal body of the church through the ritual activity of the sacraments, the ethical human imperative inherent to that divine self-gift, and the grounding of this sacramental ethics in the biblical revelation of the crucified God.” Bruce T. Morrill, “Building on Chauvet’s Work: An Overview” in Sacraments: Revelation of the Humanity of God – Engaging the Fundamental Theology of Louis- Marie Chauvet. Philippe Bordeyne and Bruce T. Morrill, eds. (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2008), xv. 82 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 490. 83 Ibid., 545. 84 Ibid., 1-2. Emphasis original.
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Chauvet uses the model of the symbolic exchange to express the way in which grace is given and received in the sacraments. Chauvet distinguishes between sign and symbol, two methods of human communication. A symbol moves a step beyond a sign by not only signifying, but also mediating the thing symbolized. It is symbol that operates within the world of gift-exchange. In the symbolic world of gift-giving, it is relationships (the who and the whom) that matter. True gift-giving operates outside of the world of value. It is never merely an exchange of goods, but rather an exchange of selves. “Because of this,” says Chauvet, “it opens for us a possible path by which to theologically conceive this ‘marvelous exchange’ (admirabile commercium) between God and humankind which we call grace.”85
The giving of a gift is, in some measure, an expression of self from giver to recipient. “The true objects being exchanged are the subjects themselves.”86 For something given to be received as gift requires a response of some kind – be it a smile, gesture, look, word of thanks, or a return gift. In this sense, every gift received as gift obligates.
This process of gift/reception/return-gift, says Chauvet, “structures every significant relationship”.87 So too, argues Chauvet, might it inform the ultimate relationship: that between humanity and divinity. He identifies two aspects of God’s bestowal of grace in the sacraments: graciousness and gratuitousness. Like true human giving, sacramental grace also belongs to the order of non-value; like manna it “cannot be calculated and cannot be stocked.”88 It belongs to superabundance, is beyond calculation, is pure “graciousness.” The second element of God’s grace is the “precedence of God’s gift,” i.e., gratuitousness, which indicates that “we are not at the origin of our own selves but that we receive our selves from a gift that was there before us. A free gift, which can in no way be demanded and which we can in no way justify.”89 Graciousness and gratuitousness, according to Chauvet, must come together in an understanding of sacramental grace.
Since every gift received as gift obligates, true reception of sacramental grace requires some kind of a return-gift as a response – it effects an increase of love for God as the giver, and an offering
85 Ibid., 99-100. 86 Ibid., 107. Emphasis original. 87 Ibid., 107. 88 Ibid., 108. 89 Ibid., 108. Emphasis original.
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of ourselves in return. It is God’s grace that empowers every movement in this cycle, including our reception and response: “[G]race requires not only this initial gratuitousness on which everything else depends but also the graciousness of the whole circuit, and especially of the return-gift. This graciousness qualifies the return-gift as beyond-price, without calculation – in short, as a response of love. Even the return-gift of our human response thus belongs to the theologically Christian concept of grace.”90
When the symbolic exchange is applied to the sacraments, the katabatic/anabatic cycle is seen clearly. God’s love for us, freely and gratuitously given, is mediated to us through the sacraments. Our reception of that grace depends upon our graced openness, receptivity, and our response of gratitude. The return-gift we offer is the ethical dimension of the grace received— how it transforms us (and the world) for the better. The process culminates in the grace received bearing fruit in our lives. Chauvet adds nuance to this structure with regard to its meaning for our growth as Christians: Gift he associates with scripture, given and received in the past; Reception with sacrament, the exchange in the present; and Return-Gift with ethics/agape associated with fulfilment in the eschatological future.91
I believe that this understanding of what I am calling the sacramental “cycle” of gift, reception, and return-gift, can be applied to musical activity. Consider that the very potential for music- making and all it entails is a gratuitous gift of God: the bodies, minds, and spirits that think, imagine, hear, move, feel, and create; the “raw materials,” so to speak, of sound, pitch, time, and timbre; the propensity for musical imagination, ingenuity, and creativity—these are gifts. True reception of these gifts entails a taking up of these gifts and offering back the self through them in an act of music-making. This reception/offering/sharing leads to the fruits of the return-gift, an increase in the recipient of love for the initial giver and gratitude for the gift.
The reason I find this a satisfying model to use when drawing a parallel between music and sacrament is that it makes room for the twofold (anabatic/katabatic) movement, and so allows for us to view music not exclusively as a medium of revelation apart from our own involvement, participation, and response. In the sacraments, God undertakes to give Godself to us in love, and
90 Ibid.,108-9. Emphasis original. 91 Ibid., 278.
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the only fitting response is for us to offer ourselves in return, thus being doubly graced by the sacramental encounter bearing fruit in our lives. The mutual self-giving that characterizes the sacramental cycle is present in music when musicians take up the gifts of God, through which God is offering self-disclosure, and receive them by activating them, offering them back, along with the self, as grateful praise in performance. God, meeting us where we are, in our embodied nature, uses those things that pertain to our physicality to communicate with us and to bless us. We are not passive recipients; but in order truly to receive, we give. Our reception of the gifts God offers through music takes place with our full cooperation and demands something of us in the exchange. When musical experiences draw us closer to the mystery of God’s love, it is that same divine love that has enabled these experiences, conceived as return-gifts, to bear fruit in our lives.
This goes towards accounting for the complex way in which the music we hear and participate in is both our own and yet it has the potential to reveal God to us in surprising ways not of our own making. Our musical strivings are our own, yet in them we may be met by God, who has provided for them to begin with. It also upholds an active view of music as a verb (“musicking”), and not as an entity or object apart from human beings. It reveals how all music making, insofar as it is motivated by gratitude and joy in awe of life—even life in its sorrows, shadows, complexities, and disappointments—may be sacramental in its rhythm of the reception of grace and return of praise. The “audience” of this music is always God, self, and other: God, who receives praise; self, who receives grace and transformation; and other, who receives the overflow.
I will draw this chapter to a close by bringing the themes explored into dialogue with two pieces of music that help to reveal the sacramental dimension of music.92
92 I remind the reader that I always intend to refer to the actual experience of the musical examples I give as performed and as heard, rather than music as a written score or as a disembodied entity apart from human participants. I also caution the reader that I do not wish to ascribe any particular religious beliefs to the composers in question, reading these into their music. Rather, I hope to enter into the musical world created by a given piece of their music and allow it to speak, witnessing to its sacramental potential.
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Musical Recap: Beethoven and Bartók in Awe of Life
Beethoven: String Quartet no. 15, Op. 132, 3rd movement (“Heiliger Dankgesang”)93 The string quartet in A minor, op. 132 of Ludwig van Beethoven is a late work, written around the time of a serious illness in 1825. The third movement of the piece stands out, not only among the other movements (five in all) but also in Beethoven’s entire oeuvre. Certainly it is some of his most captivatingly translucent and profound music. Robert Kapilow94 calls this third movement “unprecedented” in the unique kind of ethereal, suspended sound world it creates, the contrast between it and the other movements, and the way in which certain sections simply do without the kind of directional, tension-resolution based harmonic movement that so characterizes music of the Classical and Romantic eras and which otherwise governs the structure of the piece and the expectation of the listener.
This third and longest movement at 15-20 minutes, embedded like a jewel in the quartet, is given a lengthy title by the composer: Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart –“Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian Mode.” Having recovered from an illness he feared fatal, Beethoven is offering, in this movement, a “holy song of thanksgiving” inspired by his gratefulness upon recovery and as an affirmation of the joy of being alive. Having come close to death, Beethoven experiences the contrast between illness and wellness, his recovery as a surge of creativity, and life in a new way, as something miraculous, not to be taken for granted.
Let us immerse ourselves in the sound world of the piece itself. The sense of quiet, stasis, expansiveness, reverence, and meditation in tonality and time create a perduring and overwhelming sense of religiosity from the very first phrase of music. Five sections comprise the piece: three “holy prayer” sections are alternated with two radically contrasting “new strength” sections. The “holy prayer” sections are utterly luminous and mystical, seeming to exist outside time. Their “otherworldly content” actually disguises their very regular “mathematical structure” from the ear. Five hymn phrases, played in very slow half notes, always eight half notes each, are
93 A recording by the Alban Berg quartet can be found here:
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preceded by simple, imitative preludes in quarter notes. Melodically, the preludes are characterized by an opening leap (up or down), and by the staggered, imitative entrances. The Lydian mode95 prevails in all three of the “holy prayer” sections. This excursion into modality signals for the listener a sense of being on unfamiliar new terrain; of a departure from the rules and expectations of the tonal universe. The lack of accidentals, together with the extreme legato, long note values, what Kapilow calls a “glacially slow tempo,” has the effect of reducing tension to a huge degree, suspending time and space by lacking a sense of definite direction. Any sense of progression seems halted; infinite space exists from note to note. Surrendering to the piece as we listen, we surrender to a new sense of awareness. Playing the piece likewise requires a heightened concentration and focus. The modal (rather than tonal) language may be an indirect reference to religious music via the modality of chant; what is more certain is that the equal eighth note phrases are decidedly suggestive of hymnody, as, of course, is the title. However, thanks to the very slow tempo, at which each note of the hymn melody seems to exist on its own, and the intervening imitative prelude phrases, the effect is to submerge the hymn in the overall texture: a hymn is hidden within, interwoven. (See Figure 1.1.)
The timelessness of the sound world created in this first “holy prayer section” (and in the subsequent sections when the same mood returns) seems to envelop the listeners and carry them along, to urge them to slow down, notice, and attend. Because harmonic expectations are suspended, the listener feels the sensation of drifting and of living entirely “in the moment.” The prayerfulness of these sections is attested to by the hymn phrases, the Lydian mode, and the overall mood of sublime reverence and stillness. Space is being made for the presence of the divine. The preludes that ensconce the hymn phrases cascade downward from above (highest voice to lowest), and float upward from below (lowest voice to highest). Within the prelude
95 Modes are scales ordered by specific patterns of tones and semitones. One can conveniently produce them by referring to only the white keys of a piano keyboard; with each key signalling the beginning of one of the modes within the octave. The Lydian mode, for example, occurs from F to F. The modes dominated European music between approximately 400 and 1500 AD – though the notes and relationships they contain are traced back even further, to the scientific discoveries of Pythagoras and Greek thinkers of the 4th century B.C. – and continued to assert influence following the emergence of tonality. With the development of harmonized music, the Ionian mode emerged as the “major” scale and Aeolian as the “minor” scale. (“Modes,” The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2007- 2017.) Each mode contains its own characteristics; the Lydian resembles a major scale with a raised fourth degree. The plainsong of the Church is entirely modal. Beethoven may be making a reference to the music of the Church; but more likely, and at once obvious to the listener, is he setting the sections in the Lydian mode apart from the by then firmly established system of Western tonality which marks not only the contrasting sections and the remainder of the piece in its other movements, but indeed the art music of his age.
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phrases themselves, these leaps up or down occur on a smaller scale. This suggests to me the katabatic/anabatic sacramental exchange. God’s gift of self to us, and our return-gift back to God (the preludes), are yoked together by quietly ecstatic hymns of praise (the hymn phrases) which express receipt of the gift, the responding offering, and an increase in love through song.
Figure 1.1. The opening of the Heiliger Dankgesang. The first “holy prayer” section. Preludes in quarter notes; hymn phrases in half notes.
This ethereal, prayerful, and sacramental mood leads, with the transitional introduction of one accidental, into a huge contrast with the almost abrupt arrival of the new section, marked Neue Kraft fuhlend—“Feeling new strength.” With this passage, we enter a new world; it is as though the instruments have been imbued with vigorous new life. There is a strong sense of forward motion, a new, much quicker ⅜ pulse, staccato notes (contrasting the previous extreme smoothness), 16th and 32nd note flourishes (contrasting the previous long note values). Well-
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established and polished tonality returns—a firm D major—with all of its harmonic relationships, sense of direction, syncopations, climaxes, tensions and resolutions, and trills “rediscovered.” Robert Kapilow sees in this Beethoven’s illness contrasted with his wellness, and the fresh joy and energy of recovery. For our purposes, let us see as well the reception of sacramental grace contrasted with the transformative influence of that grace on one’s life. The juxtaposition of the two worlds, and the seamless way in which one world “merges” into the other, suggests to me the visible (the tonal sections) and the invisible (the Lydian sections); the outward and the inward; the transcendent and the immanent; everyday life and exalted states of grace. The ethereal, graced, sacramental moments (represented in the Lydian sections) impinge upon and inform how everyday life is to be lived, instilling it with a new sense of energy and purpose (as comes across in the lively tonal sections). (See Figure 1.2.)
Figure 1.2. “Feeling new strength.” C-sharp accidental leads to an A major chord, which becomes the dominant of the new key (D major) and so leads us into this lively contrasting section.
Following this passage, we return to the second “holy prayer” section without a great deal of preparation. We are suddenly immersed again in the world of timelessness, holiness, and ethereality. Here Beethoven introduces slight rhythmic variations, which create gorgeous dissonances, an effect Kapilow calls “colour being filled in.” Following the same transition—the introduction of the C# creating a move from A (dominant of D) into D major—the new strength section returns, just as effervescent and full of life and emotion as before. In the third “holy prayer” section that follows (marked Mit innigster Empfindung—“With deepest feeling”), the mystical mood returns, and Beethoven takes the proceedings to new heights. He creatively investigates and deconstructs the melodic material of the hymn phrase into smaller units,
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weaving a fugue with the first five notes of the hymn as subject and the prelude material as countersubject. Here, the hymns and the prelude blend together and play off one another, an ingenious and moving play, a give and take, an exchange of self. This exchange builds and is further and further developed, and the hymn phrase is intensified and concentrated into three, then two, then only one note, until we reach an immense and ecstatic climax. The ending sounds anything but final; rather, it seems simply to extend outward into eternity.
I believe that in this final “holy prayer” section, in these heartrending variations on the prelude and hymn themes, in the way these and the four voices of the strings echo one another, exchange, intermingle, dance together, strive, and focus in, and the warmth and “deep feeling” that pervades the soundscape, we can hear the desire, joy, and ecstasy of the soul and God in an exchange of self and of love, ever moving towards union.
Bartók, Piano Concerto No. 3, Second Movement: Andante Religioso96 Beethoven’s “Holy Song of Thanksgiving” is often cited as the inspiration for the second movement of Béla Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto. Certainly, there is an instant “family resemblance” when one hears them in conjunction. That Bartók looked to Beethoven’s “Holy Song of a convalescent” is not surprising, given the circumstances of the piece’s composition. The Third Piano Concerto was written in 1945, the year of his death; in fact it is the last piece he completed, which he did not live to play. Bartók was unwell and knew he was nearing the end of his life. Phillip Huscher describes the circumstances of the composition and the urgency with which Bartók worked to complete it: “His friend Tibor Serly visited him on his last night at home, and he found Bartók propped up in bed, surrounded by manuscript pages and medicine bottles, trying to finish the orchestral score of his third piano concerto. The great composer, weak and near death, was quite literally fighting the clock, filled with ideas he wouldn't get time to tell us.”97 This urgency perhaps had also to do with the fact that he wished to make of the concerto a gift for his wife, a concert pianist: “[The] solo part is written not in the explosive and incisive style that suited his own hands—the style of his first two concertos, which he often did play—
96 A recording with Andras Schiff and the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, directed by Sir Simon Rattle, can be found here:
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but in a serene and more lyrical vein meant for his wife Ditta (it was intended as a birthday gift).”98 In this last of his pieces, Bartók is pouring his heart into this musical gift, which is bound to outlive him yet forever carry something of himself.
Figure 1.3. The opening of the second movement, with the strings playing gestures reminiscent of the Heiliger Dankesang; compare Figure 1.1. The piano’s entrance at bar 16 with its hymnic “benediction of eloquent chords” (Phillip Huscher).
Bartók marks the movement Andante Religioso—the only piece of his which bears this marking. The opening, with its reverent, serene, legato quality, the imitative, cascading gestures in the strings, the pentatonic orientation—all of this recalls its model, the Heiliger Dankgesang. Phillip Huscher describes: “Like the corresponding movement from Beethoven's quartet, it has an uncommon serenity and a complete command of a few perfectly suited materials. The strings
98 Ibid., n.p.
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begin like Beethoven’s, slowly unfolding and refolding a tiny idea.”99 The atmosphere created by the strings (and clarinet) is rich and warm, setting the stage for the inner contemplation of the piano in hymn-like phrases which alternate with the strings. (See Figure 1.3.)
When the piano enters, it is solo, unsupported by the orchestra; its first statement is to “[pronounce] a benediction of eloquent chords.”100 The pristine molto espressivo, legato chords moving in halves and quarters are unmistakably chorale-like; reminiscent of hymnody in general, Beethoven’s hymn phrases in particular. The harmonies, more adventurous than Beethoven’s palate, ebb and flow, suggesting moments of intense longing, which resolve and give way to surrender.
Following its model, the piece moves into a contrasting section. This time we behold an evocation of nature, replete with birdcalls and rippling winds. The atmosphere of alert stillness suggests night-time. As in the Beethoven, a new tonal orientation, light and quick rhythmic groupings, staccato articulations, and a new momentum create a feeling of contrast with what came before (and with what follows, which will be a return to the original serene mood). Huscher deftly describes the sonic landscape of this B section: “Over string tremolos, the piano, oboe, clarinet, and flute trade bird calls—some drawn from Bartók's own notations made while he recuperated the previous year in Asheville, North Carolina. The orchestra is used sparingly, to wondrous effect. The piano awakens to the full power of the night, in ripples of sound and cascading chords, but the winds restore calm and quiet.”101 (See Figure 1.4.)
While the overwhelming mood of the A section is that of peace, wonder, and luminous awe, the B section is abuzz with life and activity. Why move from a religious moment of reflection to an evocation of nature? Maria Anna Harley suggests that the “image of the chorus of birds in the midst of a quasi-chorale may be seen as an expression of faith in the healing power of Nature, the strength of Life itself.”102 We can imagine Bartók listening to the birds singing outside his window from his sickbed; perhaps the inclusion of their song here, accurately transcribed, is
99 Ibid., n.p. 100 Ibid., n.p. 101 Ibid., n.p. 102 Maria Anna Harley, “Birds in Concert: North American Birdsong in Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 3.” Tempo, New Series, No. 189 (Jun., 1994): 8-16; 14-15. Whether Bartók’s hymn is meant to be addressed to the Deity or to the power of Nature, says Harley, is “an open question.”
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meant to represent his poignant awareness of the joy and beauty of life, so close to death. Certainly birdsong symbolizes the vitality of nature; it may even represent for our purposes uninhibited praise of the Creator, and creation being true to itself by glorifying God in music of pure joy and self-gift.103 I would like to suggest that we might make a connection to God’s presence in Creation—the world’s sacramentality—and the kind of nature mysticism associated with St. Francis, who, after all, reputedly preached to the birds—that is, he saw them as brothers and sisters, who, in being part of creation, are close to God.
Figure 1.4. The beginning of the contrasting B section. Bird calls in the piano and woodwinds, over the sparse and tremulous atmosphere created by the strings.
The final section, a return to the hymnic theme, restores the prevailing wonder and awe, this time in a kind of glorification of the piano’s chorale. Woodwinds take up the chorale proper while the piano plays improvisatory flourishes around the harmonic structure. Just as Beethoven elaborated
103 Beethoven famously uses birdsong in his Pastoral Symphony No. 6, Op. 68. Messiaen favours it highly as symbolic of spiritual purity and joy.
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upon his hymn tune in the final section of the Heiliger Dankgesang, so too is Bartók’s holy hymn expanded and taken to new heights. Calm once again prevails, but not without dramatic surges of emotion in piano and strings. The opening gesture of the strings returns near the end, as a final bestowal of grace. The movement ends intimately, with piano and low strings on an E major chord, which, as the strings have just suggested a C major orientation, sounds not so much like a conclusion as a momentary resting place; an intimation of eternity. Like the end of the Beethoven, we lack a sense of finality, but are left basking in the atmosphere of contemplative wonder. (See Figure 1.5.)
Figure 1.5. The conclusion of the second movement. The strings seem to be in C pentatonic at m. 134 as they play the opening gesture one final time. The piece ends simply and intimately, on a surprising E major chord.
Conclusion In the Heiliger Dankgesang, Beethoven makes an overt reference to religious faith, and Bartók, in following him, seems to do the same. The truly unique, otherworldly qualities of the “holy prayer” sections of the Beethoven, and the A sections of the Bartók, are evocative for me of the sacramental encounter, especially with their hymnic overtones and suggestions of gift and exchange between voices. As both composers wrote these works in close proximity to suffering,
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and an awareness of their mortality, an incredible sense of perspective is common to both works—an affirmation of the preciousness, goodness, and beauty of life (and of nature), an awareness of the little everyday miracles of life and the holiness embedded therein, and a yearning and desire to connect with the divine presence. Perception is altered in these pieces; the sense of time and space transformed; and this is made all the more palpable by the contrasting sections. Movement and embodiedness is suggested in Bartók’s B section and Beethoven’s “new strength” section, experienced also in the vital virtuosity of the musicians, and this contrasted in the “holy prayer”/A sections with the extreme stillness, altered sense of time, and unresolved endings. These alternating sections suggest two realms existing alongside one another and influencing one another—the visible and the invisible; matter and spirit,—and the presence of God permeating both.
These pieces symbolically present the sacramental awareness and exchange, which this chapter has attempted to highlight. Body, sound, note, and rhythm, together with receptive dispositions, create space and readiness to encounter the Eternal God, who can and does meet us and pour out sacramental graces in all areas of our lives, including the mysterium of music.
Chapter Two: Music and Incarnation And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:14)
This chapter seeks to present theologically relevant ways of affirming the potential sacramentality of music understood most precisely as an embodied, “incarnate,” human phenomenon. That is, I argue that because music, on the one hand, engages and affects, and on the other, is necessarily produced by human physicality (and as such has a spiritual effect on us), it signals for us the incorporation of the human body into the relationship with God in a real and positive way. The incorporation of which we speak has been accomplished in the person and mission of Jesus Christ, the Word become flesh, who lived among us as true God and true man.
The human being is neither flesh alone nor spirit alone; we are fully human body and soul. It is the integrity of these two aspects of ourselves that I wish to highlight, and to claim by extension that music, produced by and acting upon body and soul together, reinforces this integrity in a way which bears fruit in the life of faith. My emphasis on the physicality of the human being is an attempt to correct an unfortunate imbalance in Christian theological history, which has often (though not univocally) introduced a false dichotomy between flesh and spirit in the striving of the Christian for virtue and mystical union with God. Unsurprisingly, given the association of music with the body, there exists in the history of Christian thought a kind of ambivalence around music, especially as regards its use in worship, its relation to words, its sway over our emotions, drives, and states of mind.1 This debate indicates the serious nature of the question of music for Christian theology as it developed from early thought and practice, and the continued “importance of thinking through the relationships between theology and music,”2 especially in
1 See Don E. Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), Chapter Three, “Music and the Body: Christian Ambivalence” (particularly pp. 14-18) for a brief summary of some of the key issues in this debate; Quentin Faulkner, Wiser Than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996) provides a much lengthier and more thoroughgoing historical overview. 2 Saliers, Music and Theology, 17.
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regard to ethics. While the early church polemic around music was based on its association with the immorality, licentiousness, and idolatry of pagan cults, I see these attitudes emerging also partly as an extension of the ambivalence around the body more generally in Christian thought.
Augustine’s ideal of hyper-spiritualized, non-sounding music in De Musica reveals a suspicion of music’s sensuous, physical aspect as a potential detractor from prayer and growth in the life of the spirit. I argue, conversely, that music’s connection to the body may in fact be a positive force in the spiritual life for just this reason. In claiming experience in the body as a part of, and not a hindrance to, the life of faith, I see a way for musical experiences, by virtue of their “bodily resonance,” to be affirmed as potentially sacred experiences. Conversely, those musical experiences that deepen or intensify our awareness of God have the ability to reveal to us that the body is not divorced from the soul in the encounter with God. I trust it is nevertheless evident that taking bodily experience as an end in itself is not the final aim; rather, it is the rightful integration of that experience, and all it entails – emotion, feeling, sensuality, desire – into the spiritual life, which is in question here. What is at stake is not bodily experience for its own sake, but the part it plays in the experience of the loving encounter with God, who speaks to us, lives in us, manifests Himself to us in the wholeness of our being. Thus, the claim of this chapter is that music, in appealing to us on the level of the senses and the body, and leading us via the body to perceive transcendent spiritual realities, affirms for us the mysterious integration of body and soul in the human person, and the wondrous reality that God in Christ makes Godself available to the entire human person, body, mind, soul, and spirit together.
What makes any kind of denigration of human physicality ring false in a Christian context is the centrality of the human body (its embrace by Christ in taking on flesh, its final transformation to be expected at the end of time) in the key Catholic-Christian tenets of the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and the Resurrection, that of Christ and, following Him, ourselves. According to Paul, it is on the foundation of Christ’s bodily resurrection from the dead that we base the authenticity of our faith; or else it has been in vain. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul eloquently and passionately speaks of Christ’s resurrection as the basis for our own, and the transformation of our bodies we expect with steadfast faith:
For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this
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life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. (16-20, NIV) Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. (51-53, NIV) To begin, I will reflect upon the bodiliness of Jesus and what our own bodiliness means in light of His incarnation and Paschal Mystery. I will then move into a discussion of the Spiritual Senses, an illuminating way of understanding the mystical encounter with God in sensual terms that draws body and soul together. This experiential mode of relating to God points to the fulfillment of our anthropology in the life to come. Attempting to apply these motifs to a theology of music, I will describe the ways that music represents, and even results in a clearer understanding of, the interrelation of body and soul, that is essential for Christians. Finally, I will explore these ideas in two captivating pieces of music by two masterful contemporary composers who share a devout Roman Catholic faith.
“This is my body”: A Meditation on Jesus’s Bodiliness (and Our Own in Light of His)
As we saw in chapter one with regard to sacramentality, God the Son, in becoming incarnate, has sanctified human flesh. Having become human, Jesus becomes bread in the Eucharist, extending His presence in order to unite us to Himself and thus draw back to the Father all those who eat of Him. In this way, His Church too is made His body. Having suffered and died in the flesh, Christ identifies himself with the extremes of human “god-forsakenness” experienced through pain, vulnerability, weakness, abandonment, and poverty. In His resurrection, the risen body of Christ, still bearing His now glorified wounds, reveals the promise of the resurrection of our own bodies in time to come. We speak then of Christ’s body, and an array of meanings arises for us – in the manger at Bethlehem, healing and preaching in His ministry, given in the Eucharist, suffering on the cross, now risen and imperishable. In His incarnation, earthly life, resurrection and ascension, and in an ongoing way through the Eucharist, Christ has taken on, and so gathered, all flesh into the divine life. Jesus, as the Eternal God-Man, at the heart of the Trinity, draws us into His own intimacy with the Father. Dwelling in the heart of Christ, we are brought, through the Spirit, into communion with the Triune God. Christ in His humanity affirms our humanity as sacred, a way
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of being before God. While He reveals God to us in the flesh, He also reveals to us what it means to be human in the fullest sense.
For Christ, becoming incarnate meant making Himself vulnerable, opening Himself up to love and to suffer for us as God in a fully human way. “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us;” (Ephesians 5:2, NIV) definitively in the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery, and unceasingly during His earthly life. As a tiny infant, He depended upon the care and protection of Mary and Joseph. At the beginning of His ministry, He underwent fasting and temptation. As a man, He became emotionally involved in the lives of those He loved as friends. He wept at the death of Lazarus, felt compassion for those suffering, showed tenderness, was moved to righteous anger, experienced sorrow as well as joy. He spoke of the Kingdom of God in very human parables. He lived among the poor as one of the poor, seeking out the lost and the lowest. He spent Himself physically in His ministry of preaching and healing the sick. He risked being despised and misunderstood by those He came to save. He poured Himself out at the Last Supper. He allowed Himself to be handed over to a brutal death. Jesus’s human bodiliness entails a full engagement with human vulnerability, including emotion, and the experience of human helpless, betrayal, and forsakenness. This reveals a profound trust of God and obedience to God’s will to be at the heart of the human-divine relationship. Jesus offered His entire self in loving obedience to the Father. His prayers to the Father in the garden of Gethsemane reveal the interior struggle of His humanity perfectly aligning itself with God’s will. The author of the letter to the Hebrews captures this: “During the days of Jesus’s life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him” (Hebrews 5:7-9, NIV).
Jesus’s bodily gift of Himself on the cross led to His bodily resurrection, a radical vindication, in the body, of His salvific mission before God. As the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection appearances stress, the Risen Christ still possesses a living, transformed, human body—He is seen and touched by the women at the empty tomb (John 20:15-17, Matt 28:9-10), walks and talks with the disciples on the way to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-30), eats with them (Luke 24:41-43, John 21:13-14), and allows Thomas to touch His wounds (John 20:26-27). We look to the Risen
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Christ in the belief that “we will be like him” (1 John 3:2), awaiting our own resurrection and the transformation of “our lowly bodies after the pattern of His own glorious body.”3 Like seeds that are buried in order to rise to a new and unimaginable life, we die in Christ in order to be raised in Him in glory. We possess the faith and hope that this new, abundant life that Jesus came to give will be one that involves the fulfillment of all our human desires and longings.
The dignity and sacredness of the human body and its importance in the spiritual life is at the heart of St. Pope John Paul II’s highly influential teaching on the theology of the body, a cornerstone of his legacy. John Paul II is adamant that the human person be understood in the integrity of body and soul: “[M]an is a person in the unity of his body and his spirit. The body can never be reduced to mere matter: it is a spiritualized body, just as man’s spirit is so closely united to the body that he can be described as an embodied spirit.”4 In the same place, he stresses that, because of the Incarnation of the Word, the body comes to hold a crucial place in theology: “The richest source for knowledge of the body is the Word made flesh. Christ reveals man to himself.”5 This should come as no surprise. “The fact that theology also includes the body should not astonish or surprise anyone who is conscious of the mystery and reality of the Incarnation . . . . Through the fact that the Word of God became flesh, the body entered theology through the main door.”6
The phrase, “theology of the body,” says Christopher West, “represents the very ‘logic’ of Christianity.”7 Christ’s incarnation in the flesh demonstrates to us the mysterious God-given capability of the human body to make visible what is invisible, namely the spiritual and divine. More specifically, the human body grants theological insight into the “spousal meaning” of the body through the “hermeneutics of the gift”. The way that the male and female bodies complement one another, and the way in which their coming together through self-giving love results in fruitfulness and new life, serves as nothing less than an icon of the loving communion
3 Eucharistic Prayer III, in The Roman Missal, trans. The International Commission on English in the Liturgy, 3rd typical ed., sec. 115 (Washington D.C.: United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, 2011), 655. 4 Pope John Paul II, Letter to Families (Gratissimam Sane), 1994; n.p. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Accessed online at
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of Father (Lover), Son (Beloved), and Spirit (Love) in One God. “From the Father’s love and the Trinity of Persons, through the creation of the world, all the way to the body, there is a single logic of gift. . . . In the Incarnation, Christ’s body is the place of the divine redeeming gift of self.”8 The meaning of the human body, seen in the light of the mystery of the Trinity and the Incarnation, becomes aptly theological. The revelation granted by the body, in this way, is to be taken seriously, for in understanding the theological meaning of the human body in relation to the soul, we come to know the destiny God desires for us as human beings fully alive.
One way that the human body might be said to make manifest the spiritual is in the mystical tradition of the “spiritual senses.” As we shall see, for many of the mystics as for us, it may not be purely rhetorical to say that God can be touched, tasted, or heard. The physical “sensorium” (or sense faculties taken together) of the human person, through which we encounter the world around us, signifies and is even related to an inner sensorium by which we encounter God. Music is an artistic phenomenon we perceive chiefly through the physical sense of hearing, yet it encroaches on our spiritual selves – how might this be so? One way to account for this is the notion of a spiritual sense of hearing related to the physical. Keeping music and hearing in mind, we undertake now an exploration of the doctrine of the spiritual senses as it emerged in the mystical writings of the Middle Ages. We do so with a view towards becoming familiar with a potentially helpful way of conceptualizing sensory involvement in the encounter with God.
“My Whole Being Longs for You”: The Spiritual Senses “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” (Psalm 34:8)
How fully can the human person perceive God? Can God be known with our very bodies, as intimately and immediately as an act of sensory perception is to our five senses?
When we come to speak about the nature of the human experience of God, a tension arises between God’s transcendence as Creator, and immanence in Jesus, the Incarnate Word. To “perceive” God is different from all other forms of human perception. This perception is a gift originating in God’s own grace and desire to share the divine life with us. Jesus bridges this gap. God’s self-communication to us, the perfect fulfillment of which is found in God the Son, takes place within the human (and so, necessarily embodied) mode of experience.
8 Michael Waldstein, Introduction to Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them, 97.
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Despite a mistrust of the physical pervading from Greek philosophy,9 the Biblical witness is rich in sensory language to describe the encounter with God, providing a precedent for such language in individual experience.10 We may think firstly of the Song of Songs, frequently understood as an allegory of the soul (or Church) and the Bridegroom God, whose erotic language appeals to all the senses. The psalms too comprise a treasury encompassing the breadth of human emotion, in which desire for God (and its fulfillment) is often described in tangible and sensate language. In Psalm 63, to take one example, the Psalmist employs images of thirsting (verse 1), seeing (v. 2), eating (v. 5), making music (v. 5), holding and being held (v. 8).
You, God, are my God, earnestly I seek you; I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you, in a dry and parched land where there is no water. (v. 1) I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. (v. 2) . . . I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you. (v. 5) . . . I cling to you; your right hand upholds me. (v. 8) (NIV) We might also recall the importance of “hearing” the voice of the Lord through the prophets, which means by extension, understanding, accepting, and obeying it. “Hear, O Israel,” the great profession of Jewish faith, the Shema, begins. Further, the Latin for “obey,” obedire,11 carries the resonance of the word “to hear,” audire. In these contexts, hearing is more than a passive physical action; it has important connotations for the inner life of the person.
In the New Testament, God in Christ is beheld, touched, and heard in a radical new way. We might call to mind the Johannine emphasis on God made visible and tangible in the Incarnate Word (“what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and
9 I am thinking here of the separation between body and spirit that undergirds Plato’s thinking, and his preference for the spiritual over the physical, in the human quest for beauty (Cf. The Symposium) and truth (Cf. Phaedo). 10 Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley. “Introduction” in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 10-11. 11 Literally, “to listen to” (ob + audire). Audire is from the root (au), “to perceive.”
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touched with our hands” in 1 Jn 112); the physical encounters with the Resurrected Christ13; and the Pauline face-to-face, eschatological vision of 1 Corinthians 13.14 These examples portray the human encounter with God in physical, sensory terms even while extending the sensory into the transcendent and spiritual realm.
The spiritual senses present us with an interpretive framework for understanding or conceptualizing spiritual-sensual experiences of God. What make the spiritual senses appealing for our purposes are their holistic and integrative possibilities. They grant credence to the claim that sensate experience impacts and influences the life of the spirit; or to adopt St. Paul’s phrase, “faith comes by hearing” (Rom. 10:17). To claim this is to claim by extension that hearing music, making music, and responding to music physically and emotionally do have a role to play in the encounter with the God who floods our minds and senses with His grace.
The spiritual senses are most generally conceived of as a second set of senses or faculties that in some manner corresponds to the five physical senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The first set belongs to the body, or the “outer person,” in Pauline language, and allows us to perceive, apprehend, judge, assimilate, and potentially take pleasure in, exterior objects. The second set belongs to the “inner person” (soul, mind, spirit, or heart) and is capable, once gifted and illumined by God, of perceiving, apprehending, assimilating, and enjoying spiritual objects; namely, those aspects of God communicated through grace to the human person.
Origen (d. 254) is usually recognized as the first to make explicit reference to a mode of perceiving God spiritually through a sense-like modality, which he terms the sensus spiritales, a second set of non-physical faculties corresponding to our physical senses by which we perceive God. While Origen’s usage places the emphasis on the intellect and away from the body,15 the
12 Christ’s apostles clearly were able to interact physically with Him during His earthly life in their midst. This passage seems on the one hand to refer to the apostle’s memory of this contact, which they can renew by calling it to mind. Yet in the time following Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension, to what degree is this contact still possible, and even, in a new way, deepened? The passage seems in this way also to refer to a spiritual-sensory engagement with Jesus now made available to all of His disciples. 13 Christ invites Thomas to touch His wounds (John 20:27); elsewhere He bids Magdelene not to cling to His resurrected body (John 20:17). 14 “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Cor 13:12). This is a beatific vision at a future moment, and so intends towards something well beyond bodily sight; even so, it expresses a fulfillment or clarification of our present (clouded and imperfect) vision. It is seeing fully as knowing fully. 15 Origen’s concept is derived primarily from exegesis of scripture, as a way to account for sensory language in the Bible, and applied to the way in which one perceives the truth revealed in scripture. Because of his Platonist
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language of spiritual sensation took on new connotations as it came to be employed in mystical writing of the later Middle Ages. Seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting powerfully suggest tangibility, as subject and object meet, affect, and even (to varying degrees depending on the sense) envelop one another. As we will see in the examples that follow, the spiritual senses were intentionally and rhetorically invoked in an attempt to express something of the immediacy and affectivity of the human encounter with God.
What exactly do mystical writers mean when they speak of beholding, knowing, and experiencing God in a sense-like way? Although the mystics use the language of spiritual sensation and perception in different ways, at its essence it is an attempt to express an experiential mode of relating to God that implicates and transforms the whole human person, allowing for a foretaste or glimpse in the here-and-now of the enjoyment of God to come in the hereafter. In his influential essay on the spiritual senses, “Le début d’une doctrine des cinq sens spirituels chez Origène” (1932), Karl Rahner suggests that such language is both figurative and literal.16 When the mystics speak of seeing the beauty, hearing the melody, smelling the fragrance, tasting the sweetness, and touching the softness or warmth of God, they are not referring to physical sensory experience, and yet their words cannot be dismissed as entirely metaphorical. An overly intellectualist understanding of spiritual sensation, that removes the strong intimations of physicality in such language, misses the point.17
orientation, sensory language in the Bible applied to God is understood as metaphorical, making reference to a spiritual or intellectual apprehension that functions in a way analogous to the physical senses. Origen’s concept of the spiritual senses is, as Gordon Rudy’s states, both “dualist and intellectualist” (The Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages, New York: Routledge, 2002; 2); that is, staunch in the belief that matter has no part in the vision of God, which is a wholly spiritual act located in the intellect. To Origen’s thinking, in contrast to ways in which the doctrine was to develop, the body is decidedly not involved in this dynamic; at best it models or allows us to understand what takes place rightly in the spiritual senses. 16 Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, “Introduction” in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, 4. 17 Elizabeth Dreyer (Passionate Spirituality: Hildegard of Bingen and Hadewijch of Brabant, Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2005) holds that the mystical writing of medieval women mystics (like Hildegard of Bingen and Hadewijch of Brabant) seethes with passion in an attempt to express the intensity and intimacy of an ongoing encounter (better conceived of as a relationship) with God that envelops persons in their entirety, body and senses included. No aspect of the self is left untouched, unchanged, or un-implicated. The mystic’s mode of describing her life with God as a “mutual,” passionate relationship goes towards expressing its experiential, dynamic, and all-encompassing aspect; “born of the heart as well as the head” (Dreyer, xiv). We might bristle at this talk of mutuality, yet it is an attempt to express the mystic’s desire for God and (the mystic’s sense of) God’s reciprocal desire for the mystic. This language is able to transcend the overly simplistic (and problematic) dualism of affect and intellect, body and soul. Such writing attracts and challenges us to be disposed to God at greater depth, all the senses and faculties without reserve open to and attendant upon God. One should bear the rhetorical importance of such language in mind while allowing for the possibility of an actual, lived experience that prompted the text to be written.
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The language of enjoying God in a sensory way is rhetorically strong, in that it captures the immediacy of felt presence. Such contact with God is direct and non-discursive. In this mystical sense language, physical perception and all that goes with it is invoked while the essential difference is kept in mind: that it is God who is perceived and who makes possible such contact by the gratuitous goodness of His nature. Patricia Dailey delineates this connection to, yet distinction from, normal sense perception:
The inner senses, often a synecdoche for the inner person, are linked to (and often equated with) the soul and its invisible yet tangible, affective, spiritual, and intellectual properties . . . . However much the inner senses figuratively mirror the exterior senses, the inner senses are not faculties of perception in the same fashion as the outer body, but ‘gifts’ from God nurtured by the mystic.18 This description of the spiritual senses as gifts to be nurtured helps to keep in proper balance the roles of God and the individual. God graces us with spiritual capacities and initiates all possibility of spiritual perception; it is not something to be achieved by heroic striving but something to be received in humble acceptance. The individual relies upon God’s grace, while still doing what is necessary to become predisposed and ready to receive God’s gifts.
Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley highlight some of the connotations of each sense. Relying on Aristotle’s assessment of vision as the primary sense, some place vision first (as in the beatific vision, for example). Touch naturally comes to the fore when drawing inspiration from the Song of Songs. Taste is exploited when the focus is on the Eucharist, and, given its common root in Latin with Wisdom (Sapor/Sapientia), Latinate sources tend to emphasize this connection. In patristic and later sources, smell is associated with discernment, while hearing relates to the Word and preaching; we may also think of it as important for our present study where music is concerned.19 While some authors enumerate five spiritual senses the better to mirror the physical apparatus, generally speaking, a single “common sense,” capable of perceiving God, is evoked by the mingling of many sense impressions; a kind of synaesthetic perception of God. While one may dominate or receive the brunt of the author’s emphasis depending on the context (such as taste of the Eucharist, touch of the Bridegroom’s embrace, or
18 Patricia Dailey, Promised Bodies: Time, Language, and Corporeality in Medieval Women’s Mystical Texts (New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2013),17 . 19 Gavrilyuk and Coakley, “Introduction,” in The Spiritual Senses, 9.
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hearing of the Word), they are not discrete but interrelated. Moreover, the relation of spiritual to physical sensation is variously understood, as two separate sets of faculties, or as a unified whole. The capacity to sense the divine is, therefore, the spiritualized or transformed state of the one fivefold sensorium of the human person.20
This “single sensorium” view is significant, because in doing away with clear delineations between physical and spiritual perception or sensation, it helps us to see human experience on a spectrum, with the physical on one extreme and the spiritual on the other. There is much room for overlap. According to this view, the demarcations between what we might call “earthly hearing” and “heavenly hearing” are blurred, and musical experience (depending on the subject) might sit somewhere between the two. At its most elemental level, musical experience is an auditory phenomenon. Yet to allow for resonances through the auditory that open out into the recognition and apprehension of the spiritual, in keeping with the single sensorium view, is to grant music the sacramental potency for which I have been arguing.
For Pseudo-Dionysius, the spiritual senses are not so much a second set of faculties as a widened and widening capacity to perceive divine things. For Dionysius, Gavrilyuk argues, “Spiritual perception is a continuum as opposed to a set of discrete faculties distinct from physical perception, because one’s cognitive capacities are ‘stretched’ and ‘transformed’ as one draws closer and closer to God.”21 This suggests that the “nurturing” of spiritual capacities is a process of spiritual maturation by which we come to perceive more and more of God by a gradual opening of ourselves. These capacities are planted in us like seeds, holding within themselves the potential for growth and unimaginable new life. The driving force of this transformative process is eros.
Gordon Rudy suggests that Bernard of Clairvaux, in his own way, imagines a holistic set of human senses “that can be directed to both material and bodily things and to spiritual and divine things.” For Bernard, it is the whole human person, body and soul, who loves, knows and enters into union with God.22 Such a view is attractive in that it does not “dissect” the human being or compartmentalize human experience, just as multiple sense impressions are often received at one
20 Ibid., “Introduction,” in The Spiritual Senses, 5. 21 Paul L. Gavrilyuk, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite” in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, eds. Gavrilyuk and Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 99. 22 Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation, 45.
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and the same time. Instead, the tendency is to focus the spiritual senses into one unifying sense of love: 23 the collective sense of the soul by which we know God; the power that activates the senses, the sum of their activity, and the object they perceive in one. Love’s longing and consummation become a synaesthetic experience in which we delight.24
Bernard’s friend and fellow Cistercian, William of St. Thierry, employing a more systematized treatment of the spiritual senses, associates each spiritual sense with a different kind of love.25 Beyond dispassionate perception, these senses are the means by which the soul is joined to God. While sight is privileged, William is one who adroitly plays up the connection of taste with both wisdom (sapere/sapientia) and the Eucharist. Linking taste explicitly with Christ the mediator between God and humanity, he situates it in the throat, the mediatory position at the border of the head and body.26 Through Wisdom’s revelation, once “the palate of [the] heart has been healed,” we are able to recognize and thus to savour the divinity in all things, and thence, being transformed into what we have tasted, to allow the divine to be savoured in us.27 Such language does not shrink from using bodily imagery and processes to describe what takes place between the human person and God. Even when used metaphorically, there is still the suggestion that the body is literally involved, especially since love always involves demonstrative (embodied) acts for the good of the other. William’s emphasis on transformation and on bearing the divine to others implicates life in the body in the here and now.
While Bernard and William of St. Thierry may possibly conceive of the physical and spiritual senses as an interrelated unit, Augustine's treatment of the senses is more dualistic and ambivalent. On the one hand, he is cautious of the danger of remaining tied to the flesh when taken in by the delights derived from the physical senses. Blamed for the Fall, they cannot be wholly trusted since they take pleasure in both licit and illicit impressions indiscriminately; that
23 Ibid., 54. 24 William of St. Thierry agrees that love is a form of spiritual sensation when he says that charity is “the eye by which God is seen,” (On the Nature and Dignity of Love, trans. Thomas X. Davis OCSO, Cistercian Publications, 1981; 72) a perception which takes place only at the pinnacle of love’s development. If charity is spiritual sight, then its two eyes are love and reason (ibid., 77). The two lips of the Bride for Bernard, which receive the kiss of contemplation, are transposed into the two eyes of the lover that behold God for William. Hadewijch of Brabant equates spiritual sight with charity in much the same way, even referring to the two eyes, love and reason, which give mutual help to one another (Letter 18, quoted in Dreyer, Passionate Spirituality, 115). 25 In his schema, sight is the highest, corresponding to love of God, and is preceded in order by touch (love of family), taste (social love), smell (natural love), and hearing (spiritual love). 26 William of St. Thierry, On the Nature and Dignity of Love, 89. 27 Ibid., 94.
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is, the senses are known to deceive and give one wrong impressions. On the other hand, he affirms the goodness, beauty, and pleasure to be found in creation as a signifier of God, imagined here, in this passage from the Confessions, as a dialogue between the human mind and creation, whose beauty is testimony to the Creator: “I said to all these things in my external environment, ‘Tell me of my God who you are not, tell me something about him.’ And with a great voice they cried out, ‘He made us’ (Psalm 99:3). My question was the attention I gave to them, and their response was their beauty.”28
It is interesting for our purposes to note the way that the sensory power of music comes into play for Augustine in this dynamic. Augustine acknowledges from personal experience that music in the church, beginning with its sheer sensuous power (upon which the text and its doctrinal import is carried), leads one into devotion. To be overcome by this sensuous power at the expense of being impressed by the doctrine, however, is to mistake the means for the end. In the Confessions, he reveals his double-mindedness about the sensuous pleasures of the sacred music that brought about his conversion, and his reluctance to allow music’s sensuousness to hold too much sway:
Thus I fluctuate between the danger of pleasure and the experience of the beneficent effect . . . that through the delights of the ear the weaker mind may rise up towards the devotion of worship. Yet when it happens to me that the music moves me more than the subject of the song, I confess myself to commit a sin deserving punishment, and then I would prefer not to have heard the singer.29 But if I am not to turn a deaf ear to music, which is the setting for the words which give it life, I must allow it a position of some honor in my heart, and I find it difficult to assign it to its proper place. For sometimes I feel that I treat it with more honor that it deserves.30 Given its irresistible sensory delight, Augustine does not trust himself entirely to music. Rather, as his De musica evinces, he locates the benefits of music in its metaphysical association with number, moving away from the physical plane, ascending by way of music as sounding number to music as numerical proportion in a purely intellectual mode. It is music at its most
28 Augustine, Confessions. Oxford World’s Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 183. 29 Ibid., 208. 30 From the Confessions, quoted in Bruce W. Holsinger, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 74.
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disembodied and intellectual that can authentically point us toward the divine. He declares at the conclusion: “Let this be the end of the discussion, so we may next come with as much wisdom as we can from these sensible traces of music, all dealing with that part of it in the numbers of the times, to the real places where it is free of all body.”31
Elsewhere, however, and famously in the Confessions, Augustine artfully employs the language of sense perception and sensual pleasure when describing his love of God, transposing it to a spiritual key:
It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odour of flowers and ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God—a light, voice, odour, food, embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.32 Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new, late have I loved you. . . . You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant for you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.33 These breathtakingly beautiful passages reveal that for Augustine, the spiritual perception of God, brought about by the conversion of the senses, is both like and unlike ordinary sense perception, for it goes far beyond it and is not bound by time, space, and the vagaries of being embodied.
Ella Johnson contrasts Gertrud of Helfta’s more unified concept, which, focusing on Jesus in his
31 From De musica libri sex, quoted in Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, 65. Augustine’s early writings especially (and De musica is among them) demonstrate a mistrust of the physical that smacks of his but lately disavowed Manicheism. In De immortalitate animae he declares in disgusted tones: “You must flee from all these things connected with the senses, and you must take great care that while we manage this body, the feathers of our wings do not become stuck together through the slime that oozes from the things of sense.”(From De immortalitate animae, quoted in Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, 67.) 32 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, 183. 33 Ibid., 201.
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humanity as well as his divinity as the object perceived, grants physical sensation “a credibility lacking in the Platonic and Augustinian tradition.”34 Here, Gertrud addresses Christ in referring to a face-to-face encounter with him: “In this vision, flowing with honey, I saw your eyes which are like suns directly opposite my own and I saw how you, my sweet darling, were then acting not on my soul alone but also on my heart and all the parts of my body, as you alone know how.”35 The terms she uses are holistic and betray a lack of Augustinian reserve when it comes to the corporeal nature of the human being.
The involvement of the corporeal senses in the encounter with God is a matter of grace, undergirded by the Incarnation, since, as Gordon Rudy puts it, “Christ’s humanity and life in the body makes it possible for us to realize our likeness to God.”36 In Elizabeth Dreyer's words, “The incarnation makes holy all materiality, including bodiliness.”37 Even the most spiritual of love has a bodily component since it is by way of the Incarnate and ascended Christ, who rose in the body and redeemed all matter.
While the object of the spiritual senses is generally understood to be Christ in His humanity and divinity, some authors refer to specific gifts received and perceived in a sensuous manner. Richard Rolle remarks on three mystical gifts of increasing excellence: fervor (heat), dulcor (sweetness), and canor (song).38 For William of Auxerre, what is spiritually perceived are the delectabilia divina, diverse modes in which the divine nature reveals itself, corresponding to the spiritual senses, and entailing diverse forms of spiritual pleasure: fullness and beauty (vision), symphony (audition), good aroma (olfaction), pleasantness (touch), and sweetness (taste).39 Properly speaking, there is only one spiritual sense for William, located in the intellect, but diverse acts and corresponding delights.40 For William, it is through faith in doctrine that the experience of God is inaugurated, informed, and transformed. This summary quotation, highlighted by Boyd Taylor Coolman, reveals that sensory perception of God in William's understanding is essentially a synaesthetic one, which takes place under the auspices of faith, an
34 Ella Johnson, "Bodily Language in the Spiritual Exercises of Gertrude of Helfta," Magistra 15 (2008): 107. 35 Quoted in Ella Johnson, "Bodily Language,” 88. 36 Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation, 47 (in reference to Bernard). 37 Dreyer, Passionate Spirituality, 58. 38 McGinn, “Late Medieval Mystics,” in The Spiritual Senses, eds. Gavrilyuk and Coakley, 207. 39 Boyd Taylor Coolman, Knowing God By Experience: The Spiritual Senses in the Theology of William of Auxerre. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), 29, 45. 40 Ibid., 35.
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intellectual act:
By faith we see spiritually. By faith we hear what Jesus says. . . . By faith we perceive scents spiritually. For by faith we cognize that the Son of God was made man for us, that he wept for us and was tormented for us, that he sorrowed, that he suffered. And when we recall the benefits of this kind, we perceive the good odor of Christ . . . . When by faith we meditate upon these things which we know, as if by chewing, we taste the sweetness of God, and this is by faith. By faith we touch the suavity of God.41 If faith is equated with spiritual sight and intellection, it is charity that he links with spiritual touch and affect.42 While faith is the perception itself, charity is the momentum that makes the perception possible; the “desire-born movement for the delight experienced through faith.”43
Bonaventure, in a unique yet analogous way, draws the virtues into his discussion of the spiritual senses, and groups the senses in terms of intellect (sight, hearing), and affect (smell, taste, and touch). He associates spiritual hearing and sight with faith, spiritual smell with hope, and spiritual taste and touch with love in a complementary manner. While they perceive the same Object, the Word, Bonaventure distinguishes them by their different kinds of perception of various aspects of the Word: the Uncreated Word (sight and hearing), the Inspired Word (smell), and the Incarnate Word (taste and touch):
When by faith the soul believes in Christ as the uncreated Word and Splendor of the Father, it recovers its spiritual hearing and sight . . . When it longs in hope to receive the inspired Word, it recovers through desire and affection the spiritual sense of smell. When it embraces in love the Word incarnate, receiving delight from him and passing over into him through ecstatic love, it recovers its senses of taste and touch. Having recovered these senses, when it sees its Spouse and hears, smells, tastes and embraces him, the soul can sing like the bride the Canticle of Canticles.44
The Spiritual Senses and the Restoration of the Imago Dei
In my flesh I will see God. (Job 19:26-27)
41 Ibid., 47, slightly altered. 42 Ibid., 65, 112. 43 Ibid., 140. 44 Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St. Francis. Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. Ewert Cousins (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978), 89, emphasis mine.
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For Bonaventure, the recovery of the spiritual senses entails the restoration of the Imago Dei in the human person. For many mystical writers who make reference to the spiritual senses, there is a sense in which they understand these powers to be latent in us, proper to our true selves as God intends us to be. They are blocked or clouded by sin, in need of being clarified and activated – God’s action, requiring our cooperation in faith, hope, and love. Only by means of this process of clarification and conversion do they allow for the kind of intimate, experiential knowledge of God proper to us. In so doing, they restore in us the image of that which we perceive.
While Pseudo-Dionysius in the Divine Names speaks of God’s self-communication through the beautiful things we perceive with our senses and the good things we cognize with our intellect, this is only the first step. The thrust of the Areopagite’s theology moves us away from physical sensation, the intellect, and finally all cognitive powers, to be plunged in the dazzling darkness of God. Even so, Dionysius retains perceptual analogies for even the highest states of mystical union.45 By far his favoured analogy is that of vision; he speaks frequently of the “eyes of the mind,” “noetic” or “divine vision”. Vision, conceptualized as a ray of light extending from the visual organ to touch its object, is tied with the illuminating “light” of God by which He is seen and which illuminates our consciousness and powers of perception. As Paul Gavrilyuk notes, this process of illumination, and hence the activation of the spiritual senses, begins at baptism, when new capacities to behold divine things are granted to the initiated.46 The “super cosmic eyes” of the cherubim see God directly. If humans could acquire these eyes, they would be able to discern God in all things. This capacity, born in us at baptism, is ever more illumined the more we are attracted and moved towards God in love. Whether non-physical perception is part of the highest and ultimate union with God is not certain, as Dionysius’s emphasis is on the transcendence of our cognitive processes and powers. It seems more pertinent to suggest, as Gavrilyuk does, that all our powers, including spiritual perception, are unified, simplified, and ultimately transcended as our union with God is perfected, in the next life.47
In this way, the ultimate end of the development of our spiritual perception is to facilitate our knowledge of God as we move, drawn by love, towards union with God. The restoration of the imago Dei entails the awakening of these latent capacities to perceive and embrace divine things,
45 Gavrilyuk, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite” in The Spiritual Senses, 88. 46 Ibid., 92. 47 Ibid., 103.
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the end of which is to return to God. In Julian of Norwich’s terms, it is the reunification and restoration of our “sensualite [our sensory, intellectual, bodily selves] to its promised union with the divine substance,” brought about through Christ.48
This restoration may also be conceived of in terms of the reunification of the inner and outer persons. As Patricia Dailey reminds us, “In the Christian tradition, the body is not conceived of as a simple organic unity, but rather as a twofold entity partaking of two anthropological registers—the inner and the outer persons—that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come.”49 This process, by which the outer person is conformed to the inner, and so becomes “a truer reflection of the divine”50 is begun here and manifested in an increasingly full perception of God that in its immediacy and noetic power, has something in common with physical sensation.
Sensual Language and the Erotic Mystical
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” (Song of Songs 1:2)
It is to the embrace of lovers that we now turn in considering erotic mystical language as a prominent mode framing the body and sensory perception in the encounter with God. The Song of Songs, rich in sensory, tactile, body, and nature imagery, provides Biblical prompting for such rumination, and an opportunity to cast the soul, individual human being, or Church, as the Bride of God.
In his sermons on this, his most beloved of texts, Bernard of Clairvaux uses the Bride’s first speech as a starting point for a meditation on the kiss she requests of the Bridegroom. The desired kiss takes on multivalent meanings as Bernard unveils graceful trinities of kisses as ways of conceiving of the human-divine relationship, and the relationship among the persons of the Trinity. The kiss is the Incarnation in the union of God with man: the mouth kissing is the Word; the one kissed is the flesh assumed by the Word; and the kiss itself is Jesus, the Incarnate
48 Dailey, Promised Bodies, 167. Julian’s presentation of the reunification of our substance and sensualite, and the healing of our sensualite in Christ, avoids the troublesome dichotomy of body and soul and has thus been recognized by commentators as more positive in regard to the body. “The positive valuation of the body and sensuality means that, rather than being left behind or ‘mortified’ in spiritual progress, the body is cherished and enfolded in the love of God, and reintegrated in a spiritual whole-making.” (Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, 151) 49 Dailey, Promised Bodies, 2. 50 Ibid., 8.
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Word.51 In the intra-Trinitarian life, another dynamic emerges: the Father kisses, the Son is kissed, and the Holy Spirit is the kiss itself. The kiss between Father and Son from mouth to mouth, through which the Father pours into the Son “in full the mysteries of his divinity and breathes the sweetness of love” is the most sublime and secret of kisses which no creature can receive.52 To be “kissed by the kiss,” as the Bride requests, is to receive the Spirit in whom the Father and Son reveal themselves; that is, to receive “the taste of knowledge and the savor of grace.”53 As Jean LeClercq has it, “[t]he kiss of contemplation is a participation in the life and love of the Trinity,”54 received by the two lips of the Bride, reason and will.55 Putting this reception of a profound insight into God's love in terms both sensual and sensate allows for a powerful integration of the body and mind of the human recipient that loves and knows and is caught up wholly in the life and love of the Trinity. A further trinity of kisses uses bodily imagery of feet, hand, and mouth to speak of the mystic's progress through purgation, illumination, and union. The kiss on the mouth (that is, the Bride’s kissing of the Bridegroom) is equated with the perfection of union and the contemplative rapture of God’s presence, the culmination of two other kisses, on the feet (symbolizing penitence at the beginning of Christian life), and on the hand (the gratitude of those making progress).56
This talk of bodily images for God (his feet, hands, and mouth) causes Bernard to assert that these are not to be understood as literal but as “ways by which we can come to him,” as the penitent, the one making progress, and finally the lover.57 As for our own bodies, though on the one hand he acknowledges that they are the condition of our fallen state, Bernard must grant that, in the present life, the body is a help to human beings, and even made use of by God. Simply put, we need our bodies in order to act for our own benefit, and that of others.
Certainly less dualist than Origen and Augustine in his tendency to see the whole person as enjoying an experience of God, Bernard still places his emphasis on the inner person as primary in welcoming the advances of the divine Lover. In Bernard’s description of his own experience
51 Bernard of Clairvaux, “Sermons on the Song of Songs” in Selected Works. Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. Gillian R. Evans (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1987), 217. 52 Ibid., 240. 53 Ibid., 239. 54 Ibid., 209. 55 Ibid., 239. 56 Ibid.,, 221-6. 57 Ibid., 225.
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of the presence of the Bridegroom, he leaves behind all outer sensory perception:
He did not enter by the eyes, for he has no color; nor by the ears, for he made no sound; nor by the nostrils, for he is not mingled with the air, but the mind . . . His coming was not tasted by the mouth, for he was not eaten or drunk; nor could he be touched, for he is impalpable. . . . And so when the Bridegroom, the Word, came to me he never made any sign that he was coming; there was no sound of his voice, no glimpse of his face, no footfall. There was no movement of his by which I could know his coming; none of my senses showed me that he had flooded the depth of my being. Only by the warmth of my heart did I know that he was there . . . . [In] the inner man, I perceived the excellence of his glorious beauty.58
Contrast Hadewijch's account of a unitive embrace with Jesus that is all-consuming, mutual, and passionate. Characteristic of the world of the New Mysticism Bernard McGinn identifies as originating about 1200, the use of the vernacular (Middle Dutch in Hadewijch’s case) afforded the possibility of an experimentation with language that facilitated “an outpouring of highly emotional, sensate (often sexual) descriptions of the delights of loving encounter with God, as well as the inner torment of unfulfilled desire for the Divine Beloved.”59 Unlike Bernard, Hadewijch does not anchor her discussion in the Bible, but uses a (female) narrative persona that sees, feels, knows, and enjoys God in the flesh:
With that he came. . . looking like a Human Being and a Man, wonderful, and beautiful, and with glorious face, he came to me as humbly as anyone who wholly belongs to another. . . . [H]e came himself to me, took me in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity.60 Not only Christ's, but also Hadewijch's humanity and corporeality are emphasized in this embrace. Its fullness comes from the involvement of bodily and spiritual “members” alike, a fusion of both registers in the encounter with ultimate meaning through affective understanding.61 Mutuality is central in the relationship. Hadewijch goes farther than Bernard in articulating her idea that “union with God is an immediate, reciprocal, and dynamic union of essences.”62 Because she lacks any trace of duality with respect to matter and spirit, the dividing
58 Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 255, 256; emphasis added. 59 McGinn, “Late Medieval Mystics”, in Gavrilyuk and Coakley, eds., The Spiritual Senses, 195. 60 Hadewijch, from Vision 7, in The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1980), 281. 61 Dailey, Promised Bodies, 75. 62 Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation, 67.
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line between physical and spiritual perception dissolves.
The predominance of the language of taste and touch in Bernard and Hadewijch alike expresses the immediacy and mutuality of these senses (i.e., to touch is also to be touched). Inverting the traditional hierarchy of senses, Bernard makes taste and touch, because of their intimate nature, the highest ways to know God while on earth, while the unclouded sight of the beatific vision is for the elect in heaven.63 Hadewijch declares, “The most secret name of love is touch.”64
While touch naturally suggests the embraces of lovers, taste has obvious Eucharistic connotations. This, along with the Psalmist’s exhortation to “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord” (Ps. 34:8), and the common Latin root of the words for taste, to know, (sapere) and wisdom (sapientia), placed the spiritual sense of taste at the forefront of much mystical writing on the encounter with God. Tasting and eating the Bread of Life is also savouring and assimilating wisdom in an experiential manner.65 As William of St. Thierry has it, “to taste is to understand.”66
In the thought of William of Auxerre, the Eucharist is the “final locus for the activity of the spiritual senses.”67 All senses are engaged in the reception of the Eucharist, and delight results. Coolman summarizes: “The eucharistic bread is beautiful, melodious, aromatic, and pleasing to the touch.”68 The Biblical verse from Wisdom 16:20 emphasizes the delighting of all the senses, as the bread from heaven possesses “every delight within itself and every sweetness of taste.”
It is telling that Hadewijch’s vision of erotic mystical union, quoted above, takes place in the context of the reception of the Eucharist: “Then he gave himself to me in the shape of the Sacrament, in its outward form, as the custom is; and then he gave me to drink from the chalice . . . After that he came himself to me, took me in his arms, and pressed me to him,” etc.69 Touch and taste, because of their connection to the Eucharist, are likewise at the top of Gertrud’s hierarchy of spiritual senses. She too, writing in Latin, emphasizes the etymological link between
63 Ibid., 62. 64 Hadewijch, Letter 20, quoted in McGinn, “Late Medieval Mystics” in Gavrilyuk and Coakley, eds., The Spiritual Senses, 200. 65 Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation, 63. 66 William of St. Thierry, On the Nature and Dignity of Love, 92. 67 Coolman, Knowing God By Experience, 218. 68 Ibid., 228. 69 Hadewijch, Vision 7, in The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1980), 281.
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wisdom and tasting. Because the Eucharist is the supreme encounter with Christ, it is here that the fullness of God in Christ meets the fullness of the human person.70
These examples are intended to draw our attention to prominent and recurring ways that mystics and saints have grappled with the paradoxical inclusion yet transcendence of bodiliness in relating to God. The bridal/erotic trope, finding its biblical basis in the Song of Songs, functions metaphorically to indicate desire, union, and passion, while signifying, to varying degrees, a committed involvement at the intimate level of the senses and emotions.
Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi
“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.” (1 Cor. 13:12)
St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 affirms that the full perception of God by the human person (to know even as we are known) is only possible in the next life. This promised fulfillment is, however, already being made present in the here and now by the instrumentality of the spiritual senses inasmuch as they direct the eventual full integration of inner and outer persons. Above all, it is the promise of the resurrection of the body that assures a true, transformed materiality in this supreme union with God that will be, albeit in a mode we cannot now fathom. For this reason, references in mystical texts to affective, sensorially and physically engaging unitive experiences with the divine, are necessarily unaccomplished, pointing to the future, preparatory foretastes of what is to come. Patricia Dailey calls this “hosting” a vision of the divine which the mystic “eventually is able to decipher in this life, but the mystic only becomes this unity, embodying the mystery of unity, in a promised future moment.”71 In this future moment, the process by which the outer person is refashioned in conformity to the inner person is completed.
If we are to take our cue from the spiritual sense perception as it is experienced in this life, this then is the goal of human existence: “an experiential apprehension of God in the next life (in patria)” which nonetheless begins here and now; the “spiritual yet sensuous beatific vision [that] is the culmination . . . of a process begun in this life and of an experience foretasted here.”72 The
70 Ella Johnson comments: “[Gertrud] charts out a via mystica which has its summit in taste, the inner touch of God, because it is through this sense in Eucharistic communion that the whole human person, body and soul, and the fullness of God, humanity and divinity, already and not yet, become entirely available to one another.” (Johnson, “Bodily Language in the Spiritual Exercises of Gertrude of Helfta,” 102-3.) 71 Dailey, Promised Bodies, 13. 72 Coolman, Knowing God By Experience, 3, 4.
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resurrected human person, whose body will be patterned after that of the Risen Christ, will be an integral and perfect whole that will know, feel, and love God immediately and directly. In the meantime, our senses undergo their conversion and transformation to be able to perceive divine things ever more fully. As Bernard McGinn states, “full attainment of the bliss of the corporeo- spiritual human totality will not be realized until the resurrection of the body, though it is under way now in the interim period.”73 At that time, the single sensorium of the human person, now only beginning to be activated, will be fully illuminated. Our senses and whole beings will be immersed in the presence of God; in Julian of Norwich’s words: “We will be hidden in God without end, seeing him truly, feeling him fully, hearing him in spirit and smelling him delectably and swallowing him sweetly: then will we see God face to face, homely [i.e., intimately, familiarly] and fully.”74
Incarnate Music Visus, tactus, gustus, in te fallitur, / Sed auditu solo tuto creditur.75 – Adoro Te Devote, Thomas Aquinas
In the foregoing, we have sought to provide a basis for the idea that the human person has an innate capacity for spiritual perception by which, when activated by grace, we can receive an experience of God in an intimacy and immediacy akin to, and yet far beyond, physical sensation. The strongly physical language of seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing God used by the mystics is more than a metaphor. It points to a single human sensorium, which mysteriously interweaves physical and spiritual sense, and to a future moment, glimpsed now, of the full activation of our sensing powers in the integration of body and soul in union with the incarnate God to come.
For this reason, music has the potential to participate in the mystery of the spiritual senses, and so in the mystery of the human-divine encounter. Music by necessity reaches us through the physical sense of hearing; when it mediates spiritual reality to us, it does so in a way that is not divorced from the body. Music reveals and represents to us one of the ways that our spiritual senses develop and become attuned to recognize Christ’s presence beneath that which the
73 McGinn, “Late Medieval Mystics,” in The Spiritual Senses, Gavrilyuk and Coakley, 209. 74 Julian of Norwich, Revelation of Love, John Skinner, tr. and ed. (New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, Image Books, 1996), 86-7 (in Chapter 43). 75 “Sight, touch, taste are deceived in Thee, yet hearing only is safely to be believed.”
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physical senses on their own perceive. In particular, it speaks to us of the connection between “visible” and “invisible” reality, allowing us to understand our perceptive powers as existing on a “spectrum.” The sounds of music we experience with our bodies have a real effect on our inner, spiritual selves; that which we perceive with our “outer ear” resonates in, and helps to develop the sensitivity of, our “inner ear” (so to speak).
We may take an example. The reception of the Eucharist by the faithful at Mass exemplifies for us the link between the physical and spiritual senses; therein we can affirm the spiritual effects of something we receive with our bodies. In this case, some manner of resonance exists between the physical reception of the host and the spiritual recognition (through faith) of Jesus therein. God elects to be present to us in this way. In the reception of the Eucharist, the physical sense of taste and the spiritual sense of taste meet and overlap in a mysterious way. By extension, we can suggest that the physical sense of hearing, by which we perceive the sounds of music, is able to participate in the mystery of God’s self-disclosure, when what we hear opens up our spiritual ear to recognize His presence.76 This is so because we affirm that God has elected to be available to us in ways that engage us physically.
Human beings are musical creatures. In our very makeup is the capacity to create, be sensitive to, and respond to ordered musical sound, a capacity that is God-given. The importance of music and song in human life, culture, and religious tradition reveal to us the ways in which music touches upon the heart of our humanity. It is my contention that music provides us with a significant mode of coming to understand the interrelatedness of our physicality and our spirituality as human beings, an interrelatedness which the doctrine of the spiritual senses reveals. For followers of Christ, whom we believe to be God Incarnate, after whose glorious likeness we await our own transformation, this interrelation is of the essence. I suggest that there are two main, related ways of conceptualizing this illuminating power of music as regards our physical-spiritual selves, each rooted in the centrality of the Incarnation for us as Christians.
Christ and the New Song
How does music relate to incarnation – that of Christ and our own transformed in Him?
76 This example is not without its shortcomings: I do not mean to suggest that Jesus’s Eucharistic presence is equivalent to the presence of God in a spiritually significant experience of music. Still, my point is that we can and should recognize and celebrate the many sensuously-engaging ways that God’s presence is made known to us.
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First, music represents the “new age” of the incarnation and the intersecting of heaven and earth ushered in by Jesus: the heavenly song is given to earthly beings and the eternal song made new. Jesus himself is both the New Song and its Singer.
Scripture speaks of the beginning and end of time framed by music: just as the morning stars sang together at the dawn of creation (Job 38:7), so will the last trumpet signal the consummation of all of God’s mysteries (Rev 10:7). At the crux of the beginning and end stands the incarnation of Jesus, the dawning of a new age, characterized by a new song. Jesus is both the one who sings and the song itself; He is “Song-incarnate”.77 In Jesus, God does something radically new: he comes to be present among us as never before. In so doing, God allows us to hear the harmonies of heaven transposed into a human key. Lutheran pastor and teacher John Kleinig describes the Incarnation as a musical event:
The incarnation of God’s Son ushers in a new age. It is an event which evokes music and produces song. It creates a new song which began on the eve of his birth at Bethlehem and has continued ever since. That song celebrates the mystery of God’s embodiment for us and our embodiment in God. By his incarnation Christ has brought the song of heaven down to earth for us so that we earthlings can now join with the angels in their performance of praise in God’s presence. Through Jesus heavenly praise has become incarnate on earth. We can now perform the heavenly song bodily with our human voices and our musical instruments in the presence of our embodied God.78 Music in Christian thinking is first and foremost synonymous with praise,79 especially liturgical praise, and by extension with heavenly beings eternally praising God in the celestial liturgy. As the presence of God is accompanied by angelic song, so too is the coming of God among us in Christ marked by the coming of heavenly song among human beings, and our incorporation into that song. Kleinig shows through reference to Temple worship in 1 Chronicles (16:7-36) and 2
77 Michael O’Connor, “The Singing of Jesus” in Resonant Witness: Conversations Between Music and Theology, Jeremy Begbie and Stephen Guthrie, eds. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2011), 451. This is a reference to Clement of Alexandria on Jesus as the New Song; see below. 78 John W. Kleinig. “The Incarnation and Music” in That Our Joy May Be Complete: Essays on the Incarnation for the New Millennium, edited by Marian Free, Rosemary Gill, Jonathan Holland, John Mainstone (Adelaide: Open Book Publishers, 2000): 69-79; 69. 79 Don Saliers: “Early on in Hebrew Scripture God calls: “Hear, O Israel…” (Deuteronomy 6:4), and this echoes throughout the centuries in Jewish liturgy. In the Christian Testament: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17 NKJV). And the Psalms constantly evoke singing: “Sing to the LORD a new song” (Psalms 96 and 98). Luke can barely make it through two chapters of his gospel without breaking into song four times: the great canticles of Mary, of Zechariah, and of old Simeon commingle with the angels’ spontaneous Gloria in excelsis.” Music and Theology, 11.
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Chronicles (5:11-14) that music in the Old Testament is associated with the presence of God, its function being praise of God and proclamation of his goodness, his deeds, and his presence to the assembly.80 For this reason, song is also associated with the activity of the angels, who stand continually before God’s face (Isaiah 6:1-4). God’s presence among us in Jesus means that Jesus is the new temple: “the body of Jesus is now the place for theophany and praise”.81 The Gloria of the angels at the nativity in Luke’s gospel indicates that a remarkable shift has taken place: angels, who glorify God in God’s presence in heaven, now do so on earth, where Jesus is. “The place for doxology has shifted from heaven to earth”.82 Human beings not only hear, but also join the song of the angels, as the shepherds did. “The theophany of God in [Jesus] creates a new choir, in which people combine with the angels in the performance of doxology”.83 This is portrayed by the “new song” in Revelation (5:6-14), a song of praise of the Incarnate God in the context of John’s vision of heavenly worship, which is taken up by the 24 elders, the angels, and the whole of creation.
Clement of Alexandria, in his Exhortation to the Greeks, uses the striking image of Christ as the New Song. To his audience, for whom the concept of music as an organizing principle of creation would have been familiar, Clement speaks of Christ’s work of redemption as a cosmic music that brings life, order, and harmony. Greater than that of Orpheus, who enchanted beasts with his music, the music of Christ restores and bestows new life upon human beings and the whole creation:
Behold the might of the new song! It has made men out of stones, men out of beasts. Those, moreover, that were as dead, not being partakers of the true life, have come to life again, simply by becoming listeners to this song. It also composed the universe into melodious order, and tuned the discord of the elements to harmonious arrangement, so that the whole world might become harmony. . . . 84
Christ’s music is played not on instruments such as human beings play, but on the instrument of the universe, and the human being in particular. Jesus, our High Priest, praises the Father through
80 Kleinig, “The Incarnation and Music,” 71. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Heathen (Chapter 1) in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Volume II. Rev. Alexander Roberts, Sir James Donaldson and Arthur Cleveland Coxe, eds. and trs., original pub., 1885 (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 172.
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us: And He who is of David, and yet before him, the Word of God, despising the lyre and harp, which are but lifeless instruments, and having tuned by the Holy Spirit the universe, and especially man,—who, composed of body and soul, is a universe in miniature,—makes melody to God on this instrument of many tones; and to this instrument—I mean man—he sings accordant: “For thou art my harp, and pipe, and temple.”85
The human person is God’s instrument; so too is Christ God’s perfect instrument, who performs the music of the Father: A beautiful breathing instrument of music the Lord made man, after His own image. And He Himself [i.e. Christ] also, surely, who is the supramundane Wisdom, the celestial Word, is the all-harmonious, melodious, holy instrument of God. . . .The instrument of God loves mankind.86
Christ’s song is new and yet from before time: And do not suppose the song of salvation to be new, as a vessel or a house is new. For ‘before the morning star it was;’ and ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Error seems old, but truth seems a new thing. . . . This is the New Song, the manifestation of the Word that was in the beginning, and before the beginning.87 As God Incarnate, Jesus is the New Song. He is also the Singer, who brings the divine canticle together with that of earth.88 That Jesus, as the Messiah, is the New David, is significant for the connection between music and the coming of Jesus. In particular, we might regard Jesus as the “true singer of the psalms,”89 enacting them through his life and obedience to the Father and transposing them into a higher, more glorious key. This is indicated to us even in the Passion narratives of the Gospels, when, on the cross, Jesus employs verses from the Psalms, the musical praise of Israel: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps 22:1; Mt 27:46; Mk 15:34); “Into your hands I commend my spirit” (Ps 31:5; Lk 23:46). Seen in this way, Jesus’s suffering on the cross as High Priest and Praise-Singer epitomizes his perfection of praise of the
85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 173. 88 See Michael O’Connor’s exceptional and thought-provoking essay, which meditates upon the theme of Jesus singing: in his earthly life, through the Church as High Priest, and the musical and cosmological consequences of the Parousia. “The Singing of Jesus” (p. 434-453) in Resonant Witness: Conversations Between Music and Theology, Jeremy Begbie and Stephen Guthrie, eds. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2011). 89 Kleinig, “The Incarnation and Music,” 73.
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Father.90
Jesus perfects the twofold work of the praise-singer: the proclamation of God to us, and the praise of God on our behalf. We are incorporated into this song of praise and adoration, and He is present in the midst of his praising people, leading their song.91 Kleinig references a passage from Hebrews, which quotes Psalm 22 in making just this claim:
God’s Son took on human flesh and blood so that he might sanctify us totally and make us his priestly brothers and sisters, holy musicians together with him. As our brother he stands among us when we gather for worship and leads us in our praises. In 2:11-12 Hebrews says: the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying, ‘I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters, in the midst of the congregation I will praise you’. As our praise-singer Jesus not only proclaims his Father to us as our Father but also praises him for us and together with us. He became our brother so that he could sing the praises of God to us here on earth and include us in that song of praise. We may therefore join with him in his song. He is our true praise leader.”92
Psalm 22, quoted in Hebrews in this context, is the great psalm of lament and abandonment, ending with praise, which Jesus had made His own on the cross.93 In Jesus, as the singer of this Psalm, human pain, rejection, and abandonment – our song, the old song of humanity – are taken up by him in order to be transformed into glory, resurrection, and praise. “By his incarnation Christ has taken up and transformed the old song which goes back to the beginning of the world and the start of human history.”94 In Jesus, the prophecy of Zephaniah 3:17, that God would rejoice over his people with loud songs of jubilation, comes to fulfillment.95
Michael O’Connor suggests that song is to be associated quite naturally with the joy of the Risen Christ: “When Jesus is raised from death, a song returns to his lips.”96 Throughout the Old Testament, music and singing signify rejoicing in the gift of salvation, as in the song of the Israelites delivered out of Egypt (Exod. 14:31-15:1), and such psalm verses as “You have turned
90 Cf. O’Connor, “The Singing of Jesus,” 439. 91 Cf. Ibid., 441. 92 Kleinig, “The Incarnation and Music,” 73. 93 Ibid., 74; cf. O’Connor, “The Singing of Jesus,” 441. 94 Kleinig, “The Incarnation and Music,” 69. 95 Ibid., 73. 96 O’Connor, “The Singing of Jesus,” 440.
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my mourning into dancing . . . and so my soul will praise you and not be silent” (Ps. 30:11-12). This jubilant singing, as a response to being saved, points ahead to the “new song” expected to find fulfillment at the eschaton. In Michael O’Connor’s words, “Singing is what redeemed people do and in so doing they anticipate a consummation of their song in a future glory.”97
In sum, at the Incarnation of Christ, a “new song” rings out, bestowing joy, new life, and incorporating all creation. The “Song-Incarnate” is in our midst as brother, High Priest, and Praise-Singer, bringing heaven’s song to us and uniting our song with that of heaven. Music and song “proclaim the presence of the incarnate Son of God and our physical redemption in him. Through them the incarnate Son leads us in our songs of praise and involves us in the rejoicing of the Holy Trinity”.98 Christ has “translated heaven’s song into a truly earthly song at his incarnation, in order that he might make such an earthly song, together with a host of earthly singers, part of the worship of heaven.”99
Second, music, as “inescapably bodily,” signals the possibility of an integration of body, emotion, intellect, and heart/soul in our relationship with God. It befits praise of the incarnate Son of God. As an art form, serves as a “parable” for the way God chooses to be with us.
Jeremy Begbie and Don Saliers have both commented on the “inescapably bodily” nature of music, stressing this as an important element of our theological thinking about music’s integrative powers. Saliers describes the interconnectedness of outer and inner “sound worlds”:
[M]usic and its practice are ‘inescapably bodily.’ Whatever affects us spiritually or mentally also resonates within our bodies. This is especially true of rhythm and pulse. But all the features of ordered sound work through human senses to our understanding of our inhabited world. Ordered sound from ‘outside’ our bodies resonates and evokes the music ‘inside’ our bodies. The inner music is constituted by the very make-up of the human body: heartbeat, breathing, walking, and all the bodily gestures we learn and come to inhabit as a way of being in the world. Sound is sensual, yet . . . sound is also ‘interpreted.’ This requires a fusion of the senses and the intellect.100
The performance of music, and even listening to it, is a complex, multifaceted process that brings
97 Ibid. 98 Kleinig, “The Incarnation and Music,” 70. 99 O’Connor, “The Singing of Jesus,”453. 100 Don E. Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 13-14. Saliers is commenting on Jeremy Begbie’s observations (Music, Theology and Time, Cambridge, 2000; 15).
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together the power of sensation, the sense of bodily awareness, intellect, memory, emotion, and spirituality. Its unique powers of integration make it well-suited to the praise by human beings (themselves spiritualized bodies or embodied spirits) of an Incarnate God. More than this, as Michael O’Connor points out, the performance of music entails a gift of self that testifies to Christ’s own self-gift:
Singing enables praise because it involves the whole person: it is at once mental, emotional, and muscular, a work of the spirit and a work of the flesh, a work of individuals and a work that fosters fellowship. As such it is a fitting testimony to the incarnation of the Son of God, whose humanity was complete in every way. But singing is also an ecstatic act, in which the singer reaches out to others, becomes vulnerable before them, becomes a gift to them. And as such, it is a fitting testimony to the eternal life of the Son before the Father, a self-emptying life of prayer, love, trust, and obedience.101
This idea resonates with St. Hildegard of Bingen’s conception of the relationship of words to music in liturgical song, which she compares to the Incarnation of the Word in the flesh. In her great visionary work Scivias, she says, “The words symbolize the body, and jubilant music reveals the spirit; the celestial harmony shows the Divinity, and the words the humanity of the Son of God.”102 Composer, mystic, and abbess, the performance of chant was essential to Hildegard’s practice of the faith within her Benedictine community. She regarded music as a force of tremendous spiritual power, capable of leading us back to virtue by recalling for us the prelapsarian bliss of the songs of paradise, the memory of which dwells within each of us.103 Yet her letters, theological visionary writings, and her chants themselves, reveal that it was singing as an embodied act, the very sounds of music, that she prized, not some abstract, purely spiritual notion of music; for example: “The body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God.” In a further analogy, she likens the song of the Church to Christ’s incarnate presence: “Just as the body of Jesus Christ was born of the purity of the Virgin Mary through the operation of the Holy
101 Michael O’Connor, “The Singing of Jesus,” 452-3. 102 Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, translated by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, with introduction by Barbara Newman (New York: Paulist Press, 1990), 3.13, section 12, p. 533. 103 I have written elsewhere on Hildegard’s theology of music: “Recalling the Original Harmony of Paradise: Hildegard of Bingen and the Nexus of Music, Ethics, and Spirituality,” in Music, Theology, and Justice. Michael O’Connor, Hyun Ah Kim, Christina Labriola, eds. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017). See also Chapter 5 of the present work.
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Spirit so, too, the canticle of praise, reflecting celestial harmony, is rooted in the Church through the Holy Spirit.”104 Musical praise is a quintessentially human act.
We might say more, however. Returning to the notion that the body has the God-given capacity to make visible what is invisible, we can relate this to music via its parabolic aspect, something it shares with all of the arts. Trevor Hart writes of the added value, or “something more” of which art makes us aware. He argues that in this way, the arts “may serve for us as parables, casting light upon the remarkable claim of faith that in Jesus God has taken flesh and entered the stream of history as one of us. Attending to these may help us (as all good parables do) to grasp the shape of the unfamiliar through the familiar, and yet in doing so hopefully deepen, rather than exhaust, our appreciation of and appetite for the mystery which remains.”105
Attending to a piece of music, we discover in it “no less” than its notes, harmonies, sonorities, rhythms, and acoustic properties – music is, after all, essentially sound – and yet “much more” in the emotional, psychological, spiritual effects it has on us – music is more than just sound. The added value or “something more” of art relates to the fact that in Jesus, we encounter “no less” than a human being, and yet “much more”: the divine. That which God gives us in Jesus “finally transcends Jesus’s historical existence in a manner analogous to that in which art transcends its physical manifestations, for God cannot be captured in any this-worldly phenomena, and it is God himself (i.e. a ‘knowing’ of or personal relatedness to God as our Father, through the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit) which is granted us in Christ.”106 The discerning sense of faith perceives this “much more,” the deeper divine reality of Jesus that flesh and blood alone cannot perceive. Yet Hart reminds us that just as the sounds of music cannot be bypassed, the body of Jesus, His historical reality, must be held onto, and must indeed be revisited constantly to enter more deeply into the inner, transcendent meaning it reveals:
If Christian faith apprehends more than the humanity of Jesus, though, it certainly apprehends nothing less. . . . That God has graciously placed himself in our midst for touching, hearing and seeing means that this same ‘physical’ and historical manifestation must always be the place where we put ourselves in our repeated efforts to known him again and ever more
104 “Letter 72 to the Prelates at Mainz.” Joseph L. Baird, ed. The Personal Correspondence of Hildegard of Bingen (NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), 160. 105 Trevor Hart, “Through the Arts: Hearing, Seeing and Touching the Truth,” (1-26) in Beholding the Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts, edited by Jeremy Begbie (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 3. 106 Ibid., 23-4.
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fully. We cannot appreciate Mozart’s artistry unless the sound of his music remains our constant companion; we may appreciate more than the sounds themselves, but never less. There is something more than the ‘flesh’ to be considered, but the two levels must be held together inseparably if the essential significance of each is not to slip from our grasp.107
In this way, the experience of music serves as a parable for the experience of coming to know the person of Jesus. The sensory, physical aspect of music is the starting point, which reveals something beyond itself, and yet it is not done away with but incorporated into the movement beyond. So to, in the Incarnation, Jesus as a human being reveals Jesus as divine, while He remains both God and man. For our part, as members of Christ’s body, we retain our humanity even when lifted up and transformed “after the pattern of His own glorious body.”
In the final section of this chapter, we listen to two pieces of music, which, I argue, contemplate (and invite contemplation) of the mystery of Christ, the Incarnate, Crucified, and Risen One.
Musical Recap: Incarnate Meditations by MacMillan and Messiaen
MacMillan, Seven Last Words from the Cross, Cantata for chorus and strings, III. Verily I say unto you, today thou shalt be with me in paradise (1993)108 Sir James MacMillan (b. 1959) is a Scottish, Roman Catholic composer whose music is characterized by “rhythmic excitement, raw emotional power and spiritual meditation.”109 Stephen Johnson describes the often-diverse influences, textures, characters, and emotional landscapes MacMillan’s music comprises:
[MacMillan’s music] embraces a startling variety of musical styles. Dense, thorny atonal textures can suddenly yield to soaring tonal melodies, reminiscent of Wagner . . . . Jagged, complex, muscular rhythms may similarly melt into free-floating improvisatory lyricism, or fine-spun polyphony recalling Bach and the renaissance church composers. Thrillingly garish or abrasive colours sit alongside delicate, fragile patterns or velvety warmth. Hymn tunes, folk laments and brash marches float as conflicting layers in vibrant musical tapestries. . . . What draws all this together is MacMillan’s deeply ingrained feeling for musical
107 Hart, “Through the Arts,” 24-5. 108 A recording with the Dmitri Ensemble and Graham Ross can be found here:
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storytelling.110
As a devout Roman Catholic and lay Dominican, MacMillan has often turned to Christian narratives and liturgical treatments of the sacred in his music. Yet his vision is self-avowedly different from his contemporaries Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, whose music tends to gesture towards heaven by creating a pure, ethereal atmosphere devoid of tension. MacMillan’s music deals with the sacred in a much more robust, fleshly way, in which the suffering, sacrifice, and turmoil indicated by dissonance and atonality play a part; a way that is more in keeping with the mystery of the cross as a central and unavoidable part of the mystery of God.111
In an article,112 which describes MacMillan’s spiritual orientation and comments on music in relation to religion and theology more broadly, he notes the centuries-old connection of music and spirituality, and states: “More than the other arts, I think, music seems to get into the crevices of the human-divine experience. Music has the power to look into the abyss as well as to the transcendent heights.113 The flourishing in recent years of music that embraces a turn to “new spirituality,” by composers such as Tavener, Gorecki and Pärt, serves as evidence of this connection; music that is largely modal and appeals to simplicity and mysticism. This represents a discontinuity from the trajectory of 20th century post-war composers such as Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio, who sought to break from the past and the loss of meaning that it represented, and to create music whose only point of reference was itself and its own intermusical relationships. MacMillan, however, feels that music can and should connect and refer to life outside of itself.114 While he deliberately looks to the Church and its ancient tradition
110 Stephen Johnson, “Introduction to the music of James MacMillan by Stephen Johnson,” In Focus on Boosey and Hawkes Website,
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of liturgy and chant, like the so-called “Holy Minimalists,” he self-professedly differs from them in the imperturbable serenity and the avoidance of conflict in their music. MacMillan, on the other hand, deliberately seeks to face and embed such conflict in his work as a way of dealing with the cross and not skipping over immediately to the resurrection, thereby attaining transcendence without a sense of sacrifice.115
[T]o avoid the darkness and the tragedy [in music] is to refuse to face up to the abyss, which is our human experience. It is a flight from reality and from the true nature of God. Spirituality is not just some sort of easily won feel-good factor. Spirituality is something that you find in the here-and- now, in the fears, aspirations, joys and tragedies of human life, in the grit and mire of daily existence, which then raises incredible possibilities of compassion in those encounters.116
The piece that concerns us here, Seven Last Words from the Cross,117 confronts this mystery directly by using the seven sayings or utterances of Christ on the cross (as recorded in the four Gospels) to contemplate His passion. The “seven last words,” traditionally used as devotional material for meditation during Holy Week, serve as entry points into the loving, sacrificial sufferings of Jesus on the cross, together with the rich theological meanings and ramifications of each saying.
Table 1: Movements and Scriptural References of MacMillan’s Seven Last Words 1. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Luke 23:34 2. Woman, behold thy Son! … Behold thy Mother! John 19:26-27 3. Verily, I say unto you, today thou shalt be with me in Luke 23:43 Paradise. 4. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Matthew 27:46 5. I thirst. John 19:28 6. It is finished. John 19:30
musical meanings (emotions, ideas, events) are related through musical means. In the latter, music is entirely self- referential; the only relationships that can be said to exist are between the constituent elements of the music itself. That which comes closest to the truth of the matter is perhaps a both/and approach to this question. 115 MacMillan, “God, Theology, and Music,” 20. 116 Ibid., 20-1. 117 Commissioned by BBC television, the piece was aired during Holy Week of 1994 on BBC2 in seven nightly episodes. It was premiered in concert at St. Aloysius Church, Glasgow on March 30, 1994. The performers in both cases were Capella Nova and the BT Scottish Ensemble, directed by Alan Tavener.
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7. Father, into Thy hands I comment my Spirit. Luke 23:46
In his setting, MacMillan complements the seven sayings with the addition of liturgical texts from Holy Week.118 The seven movements form a cantata for SSAATTBB chorus and strings, allowing for a creative interplay between the two sets of forces, with text in English and Latin.119
The third movement of the cantata sets Christ’s words to the “good thief” in Luke 23:43. The thief crucified next to Jesus takes His part and defends Him as an innocent man. He affords Him a measure of dignity by calling Him by name, and humbly asks, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Christ’s promise to the naked, debased criminal dying beside him is that, “today, you will be with me in paradise.”
These words of Christ on the cross are incredible words of comfort and power, a remarkable promise from the lips of one undergoing tremendous suffering to another suffering alongside Him. Christ and the thief are united in suffering. We too, believing in Him, uniting our suffering, our bodiliness, and our humanity to His, are incorporated into Jesus’s suffering and so into His resurrection. We too are granted this pledge of being with Him in paradise. He incorporates the suffering of the cross into the glory of the resurrection. We look through Jesus suffering on the cross into heaven. This is accomplished through Jesus – it is Him we shall be with in paradise; Him through whom we enter heaven. It is accomplished “today,” now, in His suffering on the cross. It is something that “will be” – already and “not yet.” Here, the eternal and the moment come together.
James MacMillan borrows the text from the climactic moment of the Good Friday liturgy as a preparation for Christ’s words, which come only at the very conclusion of the movement. As the cross is brought in, unveiled, and processed towards the high altar, the following is chanted:
Ecce Lignum Crucis in quo salus mundi pependit: Venite adoremus. Behold the Wood of the Cross
118 These additional texts are as follows: the Palm Sunday Exclamation “Hosanna filio David” (I); from the Good Friday Responsories for Tenebrae (I, VI); the Good Friday Versicle “Ecce lignum crucis” (III); and the Good Friday Reproaches (V). 119 All references and excerpts of the score are from: James MacMillan, Seven Last Words from the Cross, Cantata for Choir and Strings © Copyright 2003 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission for the exclusive use of Christina Labriola, 2018.
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on which hung the salvation of the world. Come, let us adore.
The versicle is chanted three times, ascending in pitch each time, which lends a measure of increasing intensity. In his setting of this liturgical text, MacMillan recalls the dramatic liturgical action by mimicking this sense of direction, movement, and travelling upwards and forwards. The versicle is repeated three times, set higher each time, first in the basses, then tenors, and finally altos.
The piece begins in sonic darkness and in the depths, as it were, with a bass duet intoning the “Ecce lignum Crucis” text. With two solo basses in their low tessitura and low strings (celli and double basses) accompanying on a drone D, we are at the extreme low end of the range possibilities of the ensemble. The result is the deep, dark, colour. The sustained strings create an ominous and sombre backdrop for the voices. The close dissonances (minor seconds), elaborate rhythmic byplay between the voices, and intense rhythmic, chromatic figurations around the guttural, raw, melody lines, evoke incantations emerging from the depths. While the tonic is D (minor), harmonically, the simultaneous presence of both flattened and raised 6 and 7 scale degrees (B-flat and B-natural, C-sharp and C-natural), causes aural tension and disorientation. The drone, however, remains persistent and unmoved; an unyielding reality. Here is the profundity and desolation of Christ hanging on the cross. (See Figure 2.1.)
Emerging out of this darkness comes a single, high solo violin note (A6), like a stream of light, triple piano, shimmering alone for a moment before ushering in much more stable, consonant, tender section on the “Venite adoremus” text, based around F major. The new key is firmly and undoubtedly established; gone is the tension of competing and clashing minor scales. Yet F major is the relative of D minor—it arises from its relative and shares a common key signature; so too does the adulation of love flow from the awful, stark reality of the cross. The strings play rising and falling chordal figurations below the soaring, highly melodic, stratospheric solo violin line, untouchable, transcendent. The solo bass voices, meanwhile, expand to tutti in the bass section of the choir, in two parts, repeating, in a variety of tonal and gently melodic motives, “come, let us adore.” The steady 16ths of the arpeggiating strings create a sense of safety and predictability previously absent, and allow the rhythmically varied melodies of the 2-part basses
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to weave and undulate freely even while a steady pulse is felt. The quickness and lightness of the strings create a kind of breathless quality of peaceful exuberance. The effect of the men’s voices in a higher tessitura, with a lighter, and even dancelike tone, presents a new colour that is worlds apart from the desolate opening. Here the lightness and joy of love, reverent adoration of the Saviour on the cross, break forth. Love meets love – the love of those who come to adore meets the unfathomably immense love of the one who suffers on the cross.
A brief but profound bar of silence follows.
Figure 2.1. The beginning of the movement. Low strings in a distant drone and low men’s voices, incantatory.
We move to a second repetition of the “Ecce lignum crucis” text, this time a register higher, with two solo tenors and accompanied by the low strings playing in dialogue, moving in and out of a drone, less sustained than at first, higher (A, a fifth above D) and with a great deal more movement. The second iteration of the initial text signals a return to the sparseness of texture, unsettling modality, and chromaticism compared to the richness and stability of the tonal “Venite adoremus.” The two melody lines of the tenors are rich in florid and chromatic grace notes and acciaccaturas.120 This, together with the highly wrought effect of the more pronounced crescendo and the tenors singing high in the range, evokes Middle Eastern cantillation. This is also suggested harmonically: A is established as the tonic, and while C-natural is present, suggesting A minor, the more prominent presence of B-flat, C#, F, and G (notes which
120 These are ornaments or embellishments of the main melodic line.
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emphatically do not belong to A minor) suggests instead Phrygian dominant, the common and characteristic mode of Jewish and Arabic music.121 (See Figure 2.2.)
As before, the soft and shimmering high A of the solo violin returns, the promise of paradise in the midst of and only through the cross. “Venite adoremus” returns, as the tenors of the choir heap their own adorations upon those of the basses. The texture thickens with the addition of more voices, yet even with the four men’s parts singing their diverse and free rhythmic motives, their melodies and text at different speeds fit seamlessly into the consonant, reassuring tonal structure.
Silence, as before.
In the third iteration of the “Ecce lignum crucis” text, the plane shifts higher again, with two alto voices and the three lower strings (the violas now enter the dynamic). This highest “Ecce lignum” of the altos is a purer, more melodious sound, with occasions of more conventional harmonic couplings (thirds, sixths), but also retaining the chromaticism and momentary dissonances of the first two iterations. The strings play slow moving but steadily rising lines that finally culminate in the familiar high A of the first violin. This occurs earlier than previously, right in the midst of “pependit,” and clashes with the harmonies around it, until those harmonies eventually give way and form a consonance with the A, singing out softly but insistently through it all. If this pure, sustained high A represents the promise of transcendence in the resurrection, it is present in the midst of the ordeal of the crucifixion, seemingly incongruous at first, but, ultimately, revealed as the goal of all.
121 The Phrygian dominant scale is also known as the “gypsy” or the “Freygish” scale in Jewish (Klezmer) music. It consists of the following degrees: 1 - ♭2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - ♭6 - ♭7 - 1. Most characteristic is the augmented second between 2 and 3 and the flattened 6 and 7.
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Figure 2.2. Second iteration of “Ecce lignum crucis” by the tenors.
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Figure 2.3. The third “Venite adoremus,” featuring the new addition of the alto voices. Many diverse voices in various rhythms come together in adoration.
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Again, the pure unity of the high violin solo note ushers in a final “Venite adoremus” section, the grandest of all. Basses and tenors sing their diverse, peaceful adoration as before, and are joined this time by the new and higher “adorations” of the altos, which extend the scope of the worship and fit in with those around them. The luminous fluttering of the one text sung by many voices on different melodies, at different speeds, creates the effect of a massive congregation of worshippers, held together by a common activity – adoration. Here are throngs in love with Jesus, in communion with one another, looking together through the suffering Christ at the promise of the resurrection.122 (See Figure 2.3.)
Silence.
MacMillan calls what follows a kind of “node point,” a “hiatus”123 during which to reflect upon the drama as it has been unfolding. Having come to the end of the threefold repetition of the liturgical text, and still not having yet heard the words of Christ, the highly emotional string section at this point provides for the listener an emotional reaction to the foregoing while continuing the sensation of travelling, moving forward and upward, as well as the suspense as we await Christ’s utterance from the cross. The reflective material in the strings borrows rhythms, arpeggiating chords, and acciaccatura figurations from both the “Ecce lignum” and the “Venite adoremus” sections that have come before. Reflecting upon this moment, MacMillan says that the string section allows for a subjective response to the more objective presentation of the drama of Christ on the cross in the preceding sections. In the vigour, expressiveness, and intensity of the strings, there is a lack of liturgical “detachment” that allows room for a personal, affective response to the suffering and death of Christ.124 The believer responds to the horror of the beloved’s suffering.
Here, as a final transition point, the high violin note (A) remains when the others fall away, and the words of Jesus are at last heard, in a graceful, painfully beautiful soprano duet. The sopranos reach up to the extreme of their range, completing the sense of ascent that has carried us through
122 This effect is reminiscent of a section of MacMillan’s Veni Veni Emmanuel: “Over and over again the orchestra repeats the four chords which accompany the words ‘Gaude, Gaude’ from the plainsong’s refrain. They are layered in different instrumental combinations and in different speeds evoking a huge distant congregation murmuring a calm prayer in many voices.” From the composer’s notes on the piece, found on the Boosey and Hawkes website,
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the entire movement. (Vocally, the high point is a high C for soprano 1 on “today;” the violins also reach their highest note at this point, E7.) It is both like and unlike the equivalent “Ecce lignum” sections; we catch a glimpse of the cross, transfigured in glory. The two voices of the lofty, consonant, pure vocal duet float in comparative rhythmic alignment, and finally meet on the same pitch on the final syllable of “paradise.” Meanwhile, very high, ethereal violins point heavenward, moving in gradually ascending patterns until they literally reach untouched heights with D7 and end on C7. The final sonority suggests F major, the tonal centre of the “Venite Adoremus” sections, suggesting a link between communion with Christ in adoration of His cross with the final fulfillment of the promise of being with Him in paradise. (See Figure 2.4.)
Figure 2.4. The words of Christ, sung by soprano soloists. The literal high point occurs at “today” in measure 109. Heaven and earth meet here and now.
The suffering of Jesus on the cross is an embrace of human pain, sinfulness, god-forsakenness; yet through it, and for those incorporated into it, the glory of the resurrection begins to dawn. This movement meditates upon Christ’s dying words of hope and consolation to one who is suffering at His side, one who prays to Him to be remembered and is assured of future bliss. By extension, these words are meant for all who suffer with and believe in Him. MacMillan’s musical depiction of the scene is multilayered. It takes a liturgical look at the historical scene by imitating the liturgical presentation of the cross on Good Friday and the communion of saints worshipping (through sung praise) the Crucified Christ. Atop this is laid a visceral, subjective, emotional layer that invites a response of deeply felt compassion and love even as it invites spiritual contemplation. The piece, like MacMillan’s writing generally, operates at an “incarnate”
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level, by employing extremes in range of the human voice and of instruments, making use of captivating, complex, or lively rhythms, and intensifying with the use of a variety of timbral colours and harmonic tensions. The result is not just thought provoking, it is emotionally gripping. By holding together the transcendent and the earthbound, the listener responds on a physical level that gives way to religious sentiment. MacMillan does not shy away from depicting anguish and pain, juxtaposing musical darkness and dissonance with musical luminosity and consonance. The “truth” that resounds in this movement is that the darkness of the cross is infused with the luminosity of the resurrection, and the resurrection only possible through the cross. Finally, in some sense we have here a depiction of Christ the singer and the song, whose loving suffering and whose words on the cross take musical shape for our ears to perceive.
Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps, VIII. Louange à l'immortalité de Jésus (1940-41)125 The oeuvre of French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) is marked by a distinctive coherence. His thematic unity of vision and clearly defined musical language make for a singularity of compositional voice; his work is unmistakably his own. His Roman Catholic faith, love of plainsong, and work as a church organist all feature heavily, as does his synaesthesia, a condition which for him, meant that certain tonalities and combinations of sounds conjured up definite colours in his mind’s eye. Messiaen developed a system of modes – collections of pitches – by which he abided, that extended the scope of tonality and introduced the listener to new sound worlds to inhabit. Thematically, Messiaen was clear about his being guided by three overriding preoccupations: praise of the Incarnation, the Tristan and Isolde myth, and the symbolic representation of birdsong.126 Siglind Bruhn has commented that all three of these are indeed underpinned by a single, common concern: “God’s boundless love.”127 In contemplating the mystery of the Incarnation, Messiaen sang the superabundant love of God manifested through the Incarnation of the Son. In Tristan, he saw human love as a reflection and refraction of God’s love. Birdsong for Messiaen, an experienced ornithologist, was “the most perfect expression of
125 A recording with violinist Alexander Nantschev and pianist Dino Sequi can be found at:
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nature's rejoicing in gratitude of God's Creation,”128 and represented the pure joy of spiritual delighting in God’s love.
One of Messiaen’s most illustrious pieces, Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1940-41) was famously composed and first performed in a German Prisoner-of-War camp, where the composer and the three other accomplished musicians were being held.129 The story of the quartet’s first performance of this music “for the end of time” has become quasi-legendary: stories come down to us of the desperate circumstances in which Messiaen composed, the decrepit instruments, the extreme cold and damp conditions, and yet the rapt attention with which the crowd of guards and prisoners alike listened, understood, and were moved.130
For the eight-movement work, scored for piano, violin, cello, and clarinet,131 Messiaen draws his inspiration from Book of Revelation, in particular the angel who announces the end of time:
I saw a mighty angel descending from heaven, clothed in a cloud, having a rainbow on his head. His face was as the sun, his feet as columns of fire. He placed his right foot on the sea, his left foot on the earth, and, supporting himself on the sea and on the earth, he raised his hand towards Heaven and swore by Him who lives forever and ever, saying: There will be no more Time; but on the day of the trumpet of the seventh angel, the mystery of God will be completed.132 (Revelation 10:1-2,5-7; OAB)
Table 2: Movements and instrumentation of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps133 I. Liturgie de cristal I. Liturgy of Crystal Violin, clarinet, cello, piano II. Vocalise, pour l’Ange II. Vocalise, for the Angel who Violin, clarinet, cello, piano qui annonce la fin du announces the end of Time Temps III. Abîme des oiseaux III. Abyss of the birds Clarinet solo IV. Intermède IV. Intermezzo Violin, clarinet, cello
128 Bruhn, “Religious Symbolism in the Music of Olivier Messiaen,” n.p. 129 Stalag VIII A in Görlitz-Moys in Silesia, Germany. Messiaen was at the piano, Etienne Pasquier on cello, Jean Le Boulaire on violin, and Henri Akoka on clarinet. 130 “Never have I been listened to with such attention and understanding,” Messiaen famously said of the audience at the premiere. See Rebecca Rischin, For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet (Ithica, New York: Cornell University, 2003) (the above is quoted on pg. 69). 131 I have referenced and excerpted the score as published by Durand: Olivier Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Paris: Durand & Cie, 1942). 132 These are the verses Messiaen reference in his preface to the score. The angel’s words can be translated: “There will be no more delay” before God’s mystery will be completed. However, Messiaen understood it, and it certainly functions in the piece, as the end of chronological Time. Gene Biringer, “Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps: Biblical Source.”
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V. Louange à l’ l'Éternité V. Praise to the Eternity of Cello, piano de Jésus Jesus VI. Danse de la fureur, VII. Dance of fury, for the Violin, clarinet, cello, piano pour les sept trompettes seven trumpets VII. Fouillis d’arcs-en-ciel, VII. Cluster of rainbows, for Violin, clarinet, cello, piano pour l’Ange qui annonce la the Angel who announces the fin du Temps end of Time VIII. Louange à VIII. Praise to the Violin, piano l'Immortalité de Jésus Immortality of Jesus
Movement by movement, the quartet unravels the mystery of the end of time, both in the apocalyptic sense, and with regard to the way that musical time is perceived. Messiaen employs ingenious compositional techniques to suggest a sense of eternity using musical means. He does this through the use of non-retrograde rhythms, modes of limited transposition, and absence of meter.134 Yet, significantly for us, David Greene argues that the quartet does not strive only to eliminate temporality, but also to redo it anew. In this way the old sense of time is brought to an end in order to be redone (or redeemed?). Greene says that while Messiaen’s techniques to suspend time succeed in doing so, “[e]ven more interesting, however, is that simultaneously with eliminating temporality the music disobeys its title and makes the opposite take place. In each of the Quartet’s eight movements there are musical events that sustain or redo temporality. . . .For listeners who hear the music in this way, it becomes plausible that being drawn into eternity does not necessarily leave temporality behind (as in the first way of handling Messiaen’s redoing of temporality), but also does not leave it untransformed (as in the second).”135
The reason that this reading is significant for us is that it affirms that human beings do not do away with their essential humanity in the encounter with God; instead, it is a humanity transformed, redeemed, and renewed. As Greene puts it, “the divine-human relation involves that which is beyond space and time, yet it involves creatures who continue to be human and to exist spatio-temporally even when their relation to God is central to their identity.”136
The final movement of the piece is a violin solo accompanied by piano, “Praise to the
134 David Greene, “Open Completeness: Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time,” Religion and the Arts 17 (2013) [523-544], 526. Non-retrograde rhythms are palindromes, meaning that the sense of growth or fulfillment of a phrase is abolished. Similarly, modes of limited transposition lack the tendency towards a goal of major and minor modes, and so lack a sense of stability or closure. Finally, the unmetered music lacks the rhythmic marker that would normally guide our sense of temporal organization. 135 Ibid., 524-5. 136 Greene, “Open Completeness,” 525.
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Immortality of Jesus.” It serves as a kind of counterpoint to the earlier cello solo, “Praise to the Eternity of Jesus.” Both movements feature a tender, reverent, gradually unfolding, rhapsodic string melody. Whereas the earlier movement considered Jesus as the supreme Word, with God in the beginning [John 1:1], it is the incarnate Jesus, raised to glory, who is honoured here in the eighth. Messiaen describes the eighth movement in his preface to the score:
Expansive violin solo balancing the cello solo of the fifth movement. Why this second glorification? It addresses itself more specifically to the second aspect of Jesus – to Jesus the man, to the Word made flesh, raised up immortal from the dead so as to communicate His life to us. It is total love. Its slow rising to a supreme point is the ascension of man toward his God, of the Son of God toward his Father, of the mortal newly made divine toward paradise.137
A reverent love song in praise of the Risen Jesus, the expressive violin melody pictures Him ascending to the glory of the Father, and by extension, with Him, all those He has incorporated into Himself. David Greene elucidates the movement’s form: four sections, of which the first and third are identical and the second and fourth are commentaries, opening up and developing the primary musical material. In the fourth section, the themes of section one are stretched and prolonged into a magnificent climax.138
The piece has a translucent, weightless quality. It is marked “Extremely slow and tender, ecstatic.” The piano plays an unvarying rhythmic figuration of fluttering solid chords, forming a still backdrop for the legato, highly expressive, “paradisiacal” violin melody. The result gives one the sense of movement within stasis. With four quarters to a bar, at a tempo of approximately 36 to the eighth note,139 the overarching rhythmic structure is infinitely slow and even difficult to pin down, as though one cannot step back far enough to see the larger picture. The piano’s consistency means that one is not disoriented, since the pulse is steady and unfailing. Because the harmonic rhythm changes once a bar, then twice or three times as the intensity builds, one loses one’s sense of forward-looking anticipation and is able to exist note-to-note, beat-to-beat. Intense meaning and feeling are squeezed out of each note of the heartrending melody. Each violin note seems to exist in an eternity of the present moment, and yet is tied
137 From the preface to the score, translator unknown. From programme notes accessed online at
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inextricably to the note before and after. Within this expansive and weightless framework, there is still rise and fall, tension and relaxation, crescendo and diminuendo – all of the elements that exist within goal-oriented music. In this way, Messiaen achieves the paradox of direction yet non-direction; time alongside eternity. (See Figure 2.5.)140
The melody is replete with a deep sense of longing and love. Its phrases seem endless, continuous, with only brief and few gaps in the sound. (The bow seldom leaves the string.) An aching ascent brings the violin to a glorious fortissimo climax on a C#7, and yet the melody pushes beyond this point of arrival to a second goal, reaching the extreme height of a triple piano E7,141 a violin harmonic, that continues until the violinist has run out of bow. (See Figure 2.6.)
David Greene suggests that this glorious double climax at the conclusion has a theological meaning. Messiaen juxtaposes linear temporality (the sense of moving towards a goal) with elements of non-linear temporality (the sense of expansiveness and non-future-directedness) throughout the movement. This fortissimo climax on C# suggests the fulfillment of a goal in the system of linear temporality, as it comes at the summit of a long and dramatic ascent. Yet, the piece does not end there. The melody “blooms” into a higher, subtler climax on E. This way of ending, says Greene, is “curiously like not ending”.142 This is corroborated by Messiaen’s juxtaposition of two modes: E major, which belongs to linear temporality, and his mode two, which does not. There is some overlap between these two scales, but also some places of disagreement. The chords in the piano and the melody in the violin equivocate between the major scale and mode two, allowing for the presence (and omission) of notes that belong to one or the other. This is reflected at the conclusion’s double climax: the first climax (C# over an E major chord) emphasizes E major, but the second climax (especially in its melodic approach containing pitches exclusive to mode two, such as A#, D, and E#) evokes mode two.143 The two
140 Score excerpts from: Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Music by Olivier Messiaen. Copyright © 1942 by Editions Durand - Paris, France. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of Hal Leonard MGB S.r.l. – Italy. 141 Interestingly enough, this was the same extreme high note for the violins in MacMillan’s “Verily I say unto you.” E7, three octaves and two whole tones about middle C, is usually considered the absolute limit for the violin, especially in an orchestral context. 142 Greene, “Open Completeness,” 528. 143 Greene, “Open Completeness,” 529. Messiaen’s second mode of limited transposition consists of the pattern (in tones and semitones): T-S-T-S-T-S-T-S. A major scale pattern is: T-T-S-T-T-T-S. Compare the pitches in the E major scale (E F# G# A B C# D# E) to those of mode two (D E F[or E#] G G# A# B C# D). The notes of the tonic triad of E major is present in this iteration of mode two, meaning that Messiaen can suggest both simultaneously. Cf.
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Anthony Pople, Messiaen: Quatour pour la fin du Temps (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); the composer’s own compositional treatise: Olivier Messiaen, Technique de mon langage musical (Paris: Leduc, 1944).
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Figure 2.5. Opening of the movement. Slow, tender, violin melody (“expressif, paradisiaque”) praises the incarnate Word.
Figure 2.6. The conclusion of the movement and of the whole piece. The “double climax” that ends the piece: first on C#, suggesting E major, then on E, suggesting mode 2.
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representing time and eternity, exist together. Their coming together signal the redoing of temporality – humanity taken up in the divine.
Messiaen presents a wordless song of praise to Jesus the God-Man, who lives no more to die. It is a song that blends exultant peace with devoted longing, loving adoration with striving for communion. It expresses at one and the same time the particularity of Jesus’s immortality and ascension to the Father, and the raising up of all of Jesus’s own, through Him, on the last day, to the Father. Through this event, time opens out into eternity. This song exists within a framework that blends time and eternity, doing away with time in order to consummate it. Finally, as Greene points out, it is significant that this movement is the eighth in the piece, as the number eight, following seven as symbol of perfection or fullness, signals the ultimate eschatological consummation: “Messiaen associates the eighth movement with the day after the seven days of creation. The eighth day is, of course, not a day at all, but the eternity that surrounds, and also permeates, the ‘days’ of creation.”144 This music “for the end of time” points ahead to a future goal even as it beckons us to perceive (to listen for signs of) that desired goal breaking in on us here and now.
Conclusion This chapter has dealt with music and incarnation, positioning musical experience in a mediatory location on the spectrum between the physical and the spiritual. We began by reckoning with the significance of “fleshliness” in the Christian faith, with reference to the Scriptural witness, and especially the centrality of the incarnation and resurrection of the Son of God. We then moved to a survey of the doctrine of the spiritual senses in the medieval mystical Christian tradition, as a framework for understanding “how” the human person experiences the divine. The spiritual senses narrow the gap between physical sensation and the perception of the divine by relating the physical senses to a spiritual capacity by which God is “seen,” “touched,” and “heard”. This was in an effort to argue that human physicality, together with its associated sensory and emotional experiences, should be taken seriously as a legitimate locus of divine encounter. The reason that this is important to establish is that music, as Jeremy Begbie states, is “inescapably bodily”. To overlook its acoustic and physical resonance would be to do a disservice to its real, visceral power – a power that can work on us spiritually even as it affects us physically. Finally, we
144 Greene, “Open Completeness,” 528.
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highlighted the ways that music is associated with “Incarnation” in the Christian sense, representing the “new Song” and serving as a parable of the way God chooses to be with us. Music’s ability to affirm and engage bodiliness while functioning on a spiritual plane, allows it draw to human physicality into the life of faith in a way at once profound and supremely natural.
The tendons in the hand of a violinist stretching up to the highest note on the top string, vocal folds oscillating with deftness, hammers hitting keys with precision, the power of the human voice to communicate emotion and meaning – all of these speak to music’s physical resonance. In short, this chapter has meditated on the ways the “physicality” of music might be of great benefit to us in the life of the spirit. As lovers of the Incarnate and Risen God-Man, it is a life that necessarily envelops, involves, and transforms our bodiliness, senses, emotions, and desires.
Chapter Three: Music and Beauty
“[F]or what should be the end of music if not the love of beauty?” Plato, The Republic, Bk. III (tr. Benjamin Jowett)
Introduction The Greek expression for the beautiful, to kalon, is derived from the verb kaleo, meaning to call or beckon.1 In a very real way, then, beauty is a call, a beckoning of the lover of beauty towards itself, the compelling, irresistible and self-evidential attractiveness of goodness and truth.
While beauty’s relevance to ethics and theology was a given for medieval theologians, beauty's falling “out of favour” in modern philosophical circles has divorced the beautiful from the good and the true. Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar begins his monumental work on theological aesthetics by diagnosing the tragic loss of beauty as an objective reality in the philosophical enterprise. Beauty is reduced to mere sensual pleasure that has no real meaning beyond itself and worse still, is deceptive in its allure, leading to a dead end. When beauty is no longer understood as a fundamental property of being, Balthasar warns, but becomes merely subjective, when it exists only “in the eye of the beholder,” as the expression has it, such a loss entails the crumbling of the transcendental notions of goodness and truth along with it. When beauty becomes relative, so too do truth and morality. Detached from beauty, says Balthasar, “the good also loses its attractiveness, the self-evidence of why it must be carried out.” Likewise, without beauty “the proofs of the truth have lost their cogency. . . . The very conclusions are no longer conclusive.”2 Indeed, Balthasar wonders, what will become of Being itself when it is stripped of the beautiful?
The problem is not merely an abstract intellectual one, but has radical implications for life lived daily and for the ultimate destiny of the race, John Dadosky warns.3 The pervasive loss of beauty is especially evident in the triumph of practicality and of violence in modern Western attitudes,
1 John Navone, Towards a Theology of Beauty (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996), 24. 2 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Volume I: Seeing the Form. Trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. Ed. Joseph Fessio S.J. and John Riches. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 19. 3 John D. Dadosky, The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty: A Lonergan Approach. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).
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which deny the “need” for beauty. When utilitarianism and functionality rule the day over the protection and fostering of the beautiful, we see the destruction of the natural world and the squandering of the earth’s resources, as in the present ecological crisis facing the planet.4 When life-affirming beauty is disregarded, along with the recognition of the profound worth and dignity of all life, we see the perpetuation and glorification of violence.5 A radical reclaiming of beauty must take precedence if our world is to be healed. It must begin with the reintegration of the transcendental notion of beauty as a principle upholding and infusing all Being. To reclaim and reintegrate beauty into the theological endeavour is to inquire into the ways that the beauty we perceive and enjoy in matter might direct us to God, its source and foundation, by offering us insights and tastes of God's own glorious beauty.
We have already seen how music, observed through a theological lens, is implicated in the dynamic of sacramentality and of incarnation. We will now consider music with respect to its participation in, and mediation of, the beautiful. As an art form that uniquely participates in beauty, music reflects and points the way to God’s beauty, serving as a medium of God’s self- revelation. Music bears the message of beauty to us, manifesting “beauty as the sign of the transcendent goal of the human spirit.”6
This chapter will consider how and why musical beauty is of value to the spiritual life, and how it might be regarded as a sign indicating the way towards the sacred. To begin, I will seek to shed light upon the relevance of the beautiful as a source of revelation for the Christian, rooted in the Incarnation and reflected through creation and through art. In proposing that beauty is an objective phenomenon perceived subjectively, I will suggest that beauty points to and offers up (non-discursive) insights from a rich reservoir of metaphysical and ontological meaning, and how that may be so. While the ramifications of a theology of beauty are pertinent for all of the arts, and artistic/imaginative modes of relating to God, I will focus specifically on music, since my concern is to make a case for music as a unique medium of revelation through beauty. My contention will be that a theological embrace of the beautiful, with the Incarnation at its heart
4 Dadosky, Eclipse, 3-5. 5 Ibid., 58-70. Cf. Grace Jantzen, Foundations of Violence: Death and the Displacement of Beauty. Vol. 1. (London: Routledge, 2004). 6 Richard Viladesau, Theology and the Arts: Encountering God Through Music, Art, and Rhetoric. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2000), 43.
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and affirmed by the beauty of Creation, imbues music with the power to open up, via the senses and the intellect, spaces of contemplation and potential transformation in which beauty beckons us: speaks, makes herself known, leaves her mark, and invites us to follow.
Foundations and Presuppositions for a Theology of Beauty
What does beauty have to do with God, and what are the effects of beauty on Christian living? What does “the aesthetic” as an objective reality and category of human experience contribute to theology? In what way, as David Bentley Hart puts it, can beauty be called “indispensable to Christian thought”?7 In what follows, by way of introducing the major themes that inform this chapter, I will outline some basic theological assertions that undergird a Christian engagement with beauty.
1. God is beautiful, and so beauty tells us something of God. At a basic level, beauty possesses theological significance insofar as it is understood as a property of God, who is the Source and Perfection of beauty. “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new,”8 prays Augustine to his God, while Pseudo-Dionysius (and those who depend upon him) names “God as the Beautiful and the universe as the irradiation of God's beauty”.9 The Infinite is, for Gregory of Nyssa (in David Bentley Hart's words), “while boundless, still supremely aesthetic . . . an endless display of beauty, surpassing the beautiful as the ever more beautiful, imparting beauty to beings from its own depth of loveliness”.10 All that is truly beautiful, whether natural or artistic, is ultimately traced back to God: “For the Christian theologian,” says Enda McDonagh, “the ultimate roots of beauty, its convergences and differences, its human perception and production, lie in the existence and activities of God.”11 In this view, beauty has a divine origin and so leads us back to God as a sign to the Signified. Thus, in Bonaventure's theology, we can gain knowledge of God through the beauty of creation as a
7 David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003), 16. 8 Augustine, Confessions. Oxford World’s Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 201. 9 Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 106. 10 Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, 188. 11 Enda McDonagh, “Beauty, Art and Theology” Irish Theological Quarterly 72, no. 4 (2007), 339.
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mirror or vestige of divinity; of the human mind as bearing the image of God; and finally, move above the mind to the Supreme Beauty.12
To understand beauty as a transcendental property of being, as advocated by Hans Urs von Balthasar, is to reckon it, alongside goodness, truth, and unity, as something essential to all being: to exist is to have a share in beauty, which all things possess in their own way insofar as they exist. The beauty of all beings reflects the beauty of the Creator. Such a view is expressed by Augustine, reflecting on God's handiworks as imbued with something of their Maker: “Thou, therefore, Lord, didst make these things; Thou who art beautiful, for they are beautiful.”13 It is important to recognize the clear distinction between God's beauty and the beauty of created things. Aidan Nichols marks this distinction in Aquinas’s commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius's treatise The Divine Names: God is the “supersubstantial pulchrum”, who bestows beauty on all creatures according to the properties of each. He is not beautiful under one or more aspects. Rather he is beautiful simpliciter, and as the One who is “in himself beautiful”, pulcher in seipso, he is the pre-existing generator of beauty in whatever exists, fons totius pulchritudinis, the “fount of all beauty”.14
As efficacious cause (source) and final and exemplary cause (goal) of all being, God's beauty belongs to a totally different order than that of creation. Yet the mystery of the Incarnation signals the radically immanent presence of God's beauty breaking into the created world, a “new order” of beauty in Christ. Christ's beauty is the foundation for a theology of beauty, and ushers in a new era for artistic possibilities. As John Paul II puts it, in the Incarnation, “the Son of God has . . . unveiled a new dimension of beauty.”15
2. Between flesh and spirit, beauty is a gift that mediates revelation. Assuming of beauty a divine origin and in beauty a self-communication of the Infinite God in ways perceptible to finite being, we can affirm with David Bentley Hart that beauty is objective, a gift given, received, and cherished in the dynamic of love, that bridges the infinite gap between
12 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 113. 13 From Confessions, quoted in Wessel Stoker, “Beauty as a Theological Concept: A Critical Examination of the Aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Gerardus van der Leeuw” in At the Crossroads of Art and Religion: Imagination, Commitment, Transcendence. Hetty Zock, ed. (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 153. 14 Aidan Nichols, Redeeming Beauty: Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics. (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007), 13. 15 Pope John Paul II, Letter of His Holiness Pope John Paul II to Artists, 1999 (Libreria Editrice Vaticana), 4.
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God and all that depends on God. In the “overwhelming givenness” of the beautiful, we encounter God's unfathomable generosity. It is “a gift graciously shared”16 that does not depend on us; the pure and undeserved grace that is God's love brimming up, spilling over and crossing the threshold between God and finite being. Beauty blurs lines and crosses boundaries – between ideal/real; transcendent/immanent; supernatural/natural; pleasing/profound – so that there is no simple division between the idea(l) and a beautiful thing.17 In the tradition of medieval thought, spiritual beauty can be perceived as being on a continuum with physical beauty, evinced by Hugh of St. Victor's declaration, “visible beauty is an image of invisible beauty”.18 Sensory beauty in this view is never without its spiritual side.
Beauty, be it of a symphony or of a sunset, is particular and specific, meeting us on the level of the senses, in the confines of time, while pointing beyond, to the transcendent and the eternal. Enjoying, contemplating, and appreciating beauty, says F. A. Maas, “from a Christian point of view, is being existentially involved in the God-given sanctification of the sensorily perceivable.”19 In secular and religious contexts alike, beauty attracts, delights, and promises insights into the depths of reality. In the immediacy and persuasiveness of the aesthetic experience, a surplus of meaning is revealed and bestowed that evokes wonder, love, and joy on an ontological level. For this reason, says García-Rivera, “Theological aesthetics recognizes in the experience of the truly beautiful a religious dimension”.20 Something about an experience of the truly beautiful puts us in touch with ultimate significance. It even has a propaedeutic character: “Because the beauty we encounter is analogous to the beauty of God, the wonder engendered by beauty prepares us for the wonder of God's glory.”21 As Augustine knows from experience and speculation, beauty also engenders delight and affective desire, whether it be the purely rational delight of number (the highest form of music in De Musica) or, however cautiously he admits it, music’s sensory beauty in its tremendous “pastoral utility”.22
16 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 17. 17Ibid., 20. 18 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 108. 19 Quoted (in translation) by Stoker, “Beauty as a Theological Concept,” 168. 20 Alejandro R. García-Rivera, The Community of the Beautiful: A Theological Aesthetics. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1999), 9. 21 Katherine LeNotre, “Flannery O'Connor's 'Parker's Back' and Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty and Tragedy,” Renascence. 65, 5 (Fall 2013), 399. 22 Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, 9. That is, the beauty of the Church’s music, as Augustine experienced first-hand, to entice us towards the Church and a contemplation of Christ therein.
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3. Beauty affects us deeply and evokes a response, even to the point of transformation. The Incarnation is the heart of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics since Jesus Christ is the perfect image of the Father, the form whose splendour radiates God’s glory in all its fullness. As Alejandro García-Rivera puts it, we can see “a parallel of the Incarnation” in the way the human being’s perception and reception of beauty works.23 According to García-Rivera, theological aesthetics is concerned with the “human creature’s capacity to receive divine Beauty” – the capax Dei – and “the connection between Beauty and the beautiful, between Beauty's divine origins and its appropriation by the human heart.”24 God desires in the trans-form-ational power of Christ, the beautiful form, to re-form us back into a more perfect image and likeness of Godself. Balthasar articulates this as the twofold thrust of his theological aesthetics, the “theology of vision” – the perception of the form of God's self-revelation; and the “theology of rapture” – the Incarnation and the consequent elevation of humanity.25 Like Mary, who literally received the beautiful Christ into her flesh and was conformed to His image, Christians are called to embrace, and so be transformed in order to radiate, Christ’s beauty. The welcoming and cherishing of the beautiful by Christians, as a self-disclosure of God, has transformative effects.
Hart calls Christ, as Beauty Incarnate, “a persuasion, a form evoking desire”.26 The love or desire evoked by beauty, both the Creator's love for creation (which, in contemplating, He deems good) and human love for God, creation, and neighbour, “is eros and agape at once: a desire for the other that delights in the distance of otherness.” 27 If beauty evokes desire and “moves the human heart,”28 to what end is the restless heart moved but to God?29 For Alejandro García-Rivera, the exitus/reditus of beauty, the twofold movement of going-out/coming-in, is embodied in the call of Glory and the only fitting response of praise. He refers to Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem Pied Beauty, which literally begins with “Glory be to God for dappled things,” naming the beauties of both nature and plough, and ends with “Praise him.” The dynamic is a liturgical act
23 García-Rivera, Community of the Beautiful, 11. 24 Ibid., 10; 11. 25 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 32; making reference to Balthasar's Herrlichkeit. 26 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 3. 27 Ibid., 20. 28 García-Rivera, Community of the Beautiful, 9. 29 “…you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” Augustine, Confessions 1, 1; tr. Chadwick, 3.
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of “receiving Glory and returning praise”.30 Glory is the radiance of God, moving outward, which “crosses the divine chasm between creator and creature and shines forth in the creature’s side of the abyss”.31 Its form, against which all beauty is ultimately measured, is the Incarnate One, Christ. Praise is the response that breaks out as a rejoicing, through beauty, in the glory received; a rejoicing of nature (by its very existence) and in the arts, including artful (authentic, morally beautiful) living. “God's Beauty may issue forth as Glory throughout all creation but does not find completion until it ends as creation’s praise.”32 García-Rivera is in agreement with Karl Barth here, who understands divine glory as an outward-moving, self-manifesting radiance; “God's freedom to love” that “includes the response of worship that is evoked in creatures”.33
The Transcendental Status of Beauty and the Analogia Entis
In The Glory of the Lord, Hans Urs von Balthasar takes beauty as his starting point for a foray into God’s revelation in Christ. Noel O'Donaghue comments on Balthasar's placement of beauty at the centre of his theological endeavour: Balthasar asks us to look at the whole of Christian theology under the sign of beauty, as showing forth a certain form whose inner radiance is beauty and whose various manifestations are most fully known as expressions or mediations of this original form of beauty and beauty of form.34
Balthasar considers God's revelation in terms of the form in which it appears – Christ – and the splendour, or enrapturing power, which radiates from that form. Beauty, which manifests and appears as a particular form, reveals hidden depths, and evokes joy in the beholder.35 Beauty can thus be characterized as the “presence [in things] of ‘the depths’ of being, and a pointing beyond themselves to those depths”.36 This is embodied in Jesus most perfectly, as He manifests Godself in the flesh.
If, as Balthasar is concerned to convince us, beauty is a transcendental, then not only does it
30 García-Rivera, Community of the Beautiful, 18. 31 Ibid., 14. 32 Ibid., 20. 33 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, referring to Barth. 34 Noel O’Donaghue, “A Theology of Beauty” in The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, John Riches, ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, Ltd., 1986), 1. 35 Stoker, “Beauty as a Theological Concept,” 160. 36 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 34, on von Balthasar.
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possess universality, but also, since the transcendentals are co-inherent, the beautiful takes us to the heart of being by putting us in touch with the truth, goodness, and unity of existence. The transcendentals cannot be separated; one announces the presence of all. The interconnectedness of the beautiful with the other transcendentals is what makes it so valuable: “The light of the transcendentals, the one, the true, the good and the beautiful, is one with the light of philosophy and can shine only if it remains undivided. A transcendence of the beautiful alone is not viable.”37 The beautiful, in its pleasingness, draws the senses and intellect to itself, and there one finds the depths of being.
Balthasar identifies Thomas Aquinas as the last great philosopher to come to grips with beauty as a transcendental. According to the interpretation of Francis J. Kovach, we can take Aquinas’s thought as the historical pinnacle or climax of metaphysical beauty taken seriously. Though Aquinas did not treat beauty systematically as such, his later writings (influenced by the study of the Pseudo-Dionysius) reveal the incorporation of beauty into the schema of transcendentals.38 Jacques Maritain, in Art and Scholasticism, claims outright that for Aquinas, “the beautiful belongs to the order of transcendentals . . . Like the one, the true and the good, it is being itself considered from a certain aspect, it is a property of being”.39 Likewise, Aidan Nichols is concerned (in a similar manner to Gilbert Narcisse) to highlight the preponderance of Thomas's concept of convenientia – fittingness – in his doctrinal work as pointing to “a sense of wider theological beauty”.40 Perhaps, for Thomas, beauty is a transcendental of a different order than the others. Bonaventure understood beauty in just such a manner, as the splendour of all the transcendentals together; a kind of luminescent unity of all the properties of being.41 Understanding Balthasar’s use of the analogy of being, at the heart of Thomistic thought, grounds a theology of beauty by making contact with the divine possible for human beings. The
37 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Beauty and Revelation,” Philosophy Today Volume 3, Issue 4 (Winter 1959), 239. 38 Jan Aertsen, against Kovach and Maritain, argues that Aquinas never intended Beauty as a transcendental, primarily because he did not treat beauty in De Veritate, in which he takes great pains to delineate the transcendentals. However, Kovach argues that based on the weight of his later writings, we must be compelled to include beauty as a transcendental for Aquinas. See Jan Aertzen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996) and Francis J. Kovach, Philosophy of Beauty (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974); Dadosky, Eclipse, 32-48. 39 Quoted in LeNotre, “Flannery O'Connor's 'Parker's Back,'” 400. 40 Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, 14-18. 41 John D., The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty: A Lonergan Approach. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 50.
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analogia entis declares a “dissimilar similarity” between divine and human modes of being.42 “For von Balthasar, the ‘ontological difference’, the fact that a thing’s being such, being a shoe or a star, differs from its being at all, is the basis of Christian philosophy.”43 In God, the divine I AM, what-ness and is-ness are united. While God cannot be said to exist in the way that created things do, creatures participate in some manner, analogously, in the divine being.44 Yet “our likeness to God [is] within an always greater unlikeness”.45 The infinite difference – God as radically Other – and yet participation of the created being in the divine life is itself an extension of God's glory. David Bentley Hart explains that “beings express God's infinite being by being other than God, not as the negation or occlusion of that being, but by bearing testimony to the richness and glory of the infinite”.46 It is in this difference that the delight and love evoked by the beautiful is found. For this reason, “the analogia entis is supremely aesthetic,” making our created finitude the place where the uncreated Infinite meets us and breaks upon us. Delighting, and giving delight, in dissimilar similitude, we are drawn in to the “trinitarian distance” in which all exists.47 Once again, as Katherine LeNotre articulates, the Incarnation undergirds this approach to the beautiful, in making the analogy of being possible at all: “Only the all-powerful Christ can cross the infinite distance between the Creator and the creature. . . . Without the divine person taking on human nature there would be no analogy of being – no similarity of the infinite with the finite – and hence beauty would not be intelligible to us.”48
The Incarnation for Balthasar is supreme and essential. Understanding Christ as form allows Balthasar to call Christianity “the aesthetic religion par excellence,” since its whole mystery “is
42 In line with the analogy of being, García-Rivera makes the beauty of “difference” the centrepiece of his theological aesthetics. In view of the evidence – God's creation of and involvement in this particular world in its multiplicity and “dappled,” “pied beauty” – we must affirm that difference and particularity are loved by God: “God's ordained power . . . reveals a love of difference, a love for this world.” . . . “An omnipresent God who creates a particular, unique universe does so out of love for its own unique beauty” (157, 169). García-Rivera connects this insight with semiotics and Latin American theology, his argument hinging on the concept of “difference.” According to García-Rivera, Charles Peirce's work on the logic of signs suggests that “[b]eing is relational. Being manifests itself as the difference between creatures” (155). This leads him to link beauty as a relational reality with a semiotic aesthetics of “foregrounding,” after Jan Mukarovsky, which he applies to the aesthetic ideal of “lifting up of the lowly,” as Mary sings in the Magnificat. The beauty of difference is central, he argues, to Latin American theology and typified by Our Lady of Guadalupe, who appears as both Native and Spanish, a manifestation of God's reconciling love. Beauty, then, becomes an ideal with ramifications for social justice. 43 Francesca Murphy, “The Sound of the ‘Analogia Entis’ Part I.” New Blackfriars, 74:876 (1993), 509. 44 García-Rivera, Community of the Beautiful, 79-80 45 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 241; as stated by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. 46 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 213. 47 Ibid., 246-8. 48 LeNotre, “Flannery O'Connor's 'Parker's Back,'” 402.
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that the form does not stand in opposition to infinite light”.49 Christ is the form of the encounter between God and humanity, at once embodying the experience of what God is, and the experience of the humanity as God wants us to be.50 It is by God’s condescension that humankind is exalted and can, in an essentially human way, encounter and experience God. In short, astoundingly, Christ renders the invisible God visible. The Incarnate God is the fulfillment of the unimaginable whereby “God himself is seen, heard, and touched by men, he associates with them in a human way, dies for them, and gives himself to them as their food and drink”.51 This is the backbone of theological aesthetics: “if we can speak of a theological aesthetics it is only because it is on his own initiative . . . that God takes form and allows himself to be seen, heard, and touched”.52
Interestingly, as Francesca Murphy points out, Balthasar uses music and its manifestation of the beautiful as a way to understand the ontological difference. Deep receptivity to music functions as a symbol of openness to apprehend the fullness of “that which is,” while musical form functions as an analogy for the revelation of the beautiful, ultimately based upon the perfect convergence of form and splendour in Christ.53 Philip McCosker highlights what he regards as Balthasar’s Christologically-shaped thinking about music, in particular “the confluence of opposites (eternity and temporality, ineffability and excess of expression, the part expressing the whole)” in music, which is consonant with the relation between Christ’s human and divine natures.54
In a theological meditation on “The Farewell Trio” from Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte, Balthasar identifies the deeply affecting power of the beauty of Mozart here: in the confluence of what is human and earthly with what is eternal and divine, in a way that maintains the real integrity of the earthly: In Mozart . . . a sphere lies open, invisibly, beyond this one, to receive the earthly play. This earthly drama is not justified or reevaluated in that other sphere only at a subsequent stage, nor is it broken down into a transitory
49 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 216. 50 Ibid., 303-4. 51 Ibid., 318. 52 Ibid., 311. 53 Francesca Murphy, “The Sound of the ‘Analogia Entis’ Part II.” New Blackfriars, 74:877 (1993), 557-565. 54 Phillip McCosker, “Blessed Tension: Barth and Von Balthasar on the Music of Mozart,” in The Way: A Review of Christian Spirituality Published by the British Jesuits 44 (2005): 93.
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chaff and an eternal kernel, which alone would be gathered into the heavenly barns: rather, what is earthly always takes place from the very outset, without any abbreviation, in the medium of what lies beyond the earthly and makes a space for it. There is no transposition: the world is in the sphere of redemption, and earth is in heaven in its true and authentic position. It is indeed earth’s blindness that it does not see the paradise that surrounds it; this is the obliqueness and the suspended note of the old aeon which has not yet been resolved over the fundamental tonality that has, however, already been achieved; but this blindness cannot prevent the earth from being closed in by the garden hedge of old Eden, in the very midst of its blindness.55
The situating of the earthly already in the midst of heaven, the divine reality penetrating it from all angles – this is what Balthasar finds in the music of Mozart.
Christ, Archetype of Beauty
While we have touched upon this theme already, we come now to a consideration of what is arguably (and certainly for Balthasar) the cornerstone of all theological aesthetics, Christ as Image of the Father and Beauty Incarnate. The Hebrew Scriptures praise Wisdom as the “radiantly beautiful ‘reflection’ or ‘spotless mirror image’ of God the Creator” (Wisdom 7:26; 13:3-5).56 For Christians, it is the Son, the Word and self-expression of the Father, who comes to be identified with this role. Jesus declares to Philip in the Gospel of John that to see Him is to have seen the Father (John 14:9). Jesus affords us the sight, sound, and touch of God. 1 John 1 speaks of the senses apprehending the Eternal Word, now made tangible and manifest in the person of Jesus: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (NRSV). This, in Hart’s words, is “the Lord who saves precisely because he can be grasped, precisely because of his concrete particularity, his real and appearing beauty”.57 The tangible presence of Christ, His broken body, touched, seen, and consumed as nourishment in the Eucharist “reveals the nature of his divinity – the essential condescension of divine love – and it is by way of his flesh that his divinity is imparted to others”.58
55 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Farewell Trio,” Explorations in Theology III: Creator Spirit (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 781-2. 56 Gerald O’Collins, “The Beauty of Christ,” The Way, 44/4 (October 2005), 10. 57 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 320. 58 Ibid.
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Aquinas ascribes Beauty in a special way to the Son as image of the Father.59 Jesus himself is the shining forth of God’s glory and so the standard for all revelation. For Balthasar, the Incarnate Son is the “very apex and archetype of beauty in the world, whether men see it or not”.60 Christ, as the perfect image of the Father, is the archetype and aesthetic model of all Beauty, by which all beauty is to be measured and whose appearance in the flesh is the foundation for earthly beauty as a source of revelation.61 Writing on Balthasar, Katherine LeNotre describes the way in which the Incarnation becomes the foundation of all experience of beauty as revelatory: The incarnation of beauty as such transforms our experience and insight into beauty. This understanding of Christ as 'the very apex and archetype of beauty' is the heart of von Balthasar’s theological aesthetics. If beauty is a revelation of divine glory, our understanding of beauty must reflect what we can know of God. God's revelation and his personal entrance into human history in the Incarnation reveal beauty's full nature. Without Christ, we know beauty only imperfectly and partially.62
Christ’s beauty defines the fullness of beauty. It is not an abstract beauty but one that can be grasped and perceived in myriad ways, permeating His “pre-existence,” His earthly life and ministry, His suffering and death, and His resurrected glory. Commenting on Psalm 45, Augustine declares that beauty characterizes Christ at every stage of existence:
He then is beautiful in heaven, beautiful on earth; beautiful in the womb, beautiful in his parents' arms; beautiful in his miracles; beautiful under the scourge; beautiful when inviting to life . . . beautiful in laying down his life; beautiful in taking it up again; beautiful on the cross; beautiful in the sepulchre; beautiful in heaven.63 The gospels illuminate Christ’s earthly life as an epiphany of beauty. Christ’s beauty is manifest in the joy of Mary and Elizabeth’s meeting; the glory of the nativity; and the recognition and rejoicing of the shepherds, Simeon, Anna, and the magi upon encountering the child. In His ministry, His words and presence attract followers; in His baptism and transfiguration, the Father “lovingly contemplates and affirms divine beauty: ‘You are my beloved Son; my favor rests on you’” [Mk 1:11].64 His self-presentation as the bridegroom, and as the good, or “beautiful”
59 Navone, Towards a Theology of Beauty, 26. 60 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 32. 61 C.f. García-Rivera, Community of the Beautiful, 15; Stoker, “Beauty as a Theological Concept,” 160-1. 62 LeNotre, “Flannery O'Connor's 'Parker's Back,'” 401. 63 Enarrationes in Psalmos, quoted in O'Collins, “The Beauty of Christ,” 7. 64 Navone, Towards a Theology of Beauty, 28.
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shepherd65 whose sheep know and respond to His voice (just as Magdalene does in the garden following the Resurrection) also manifests His beauty.
In the passion and resurrection of Christ, the Christian notion of beauty is expanded to embrace the extremes of the “terrible beauty”66 of pain and suffering endured for love, and the radiant beauty of the love that defeats death. Unlike the classical ideal of beauty, Christian beauty embraces even “the grotesque pain” of the passion and the “suffering and ugliness of sin,”67 since it entails God’s movement towards us in Christ, “a move that at the same time is an emptying that culminates in the Cross”.68 The cross is bathed in the light of the resurrection, the triumphant beauty of the Risen Lord of which it is part and parcel. Conversely, one might say, the beauty of the cross, endured for love, shines through the resurrection. The resurrection itself, a breaking into time of eternal beauty, is a decidedly aesthetic event, says Hart: “eyes and hands can tell it, time comprehends it, it has shape and quality and splendor, it allows scrutiny and contemplation and astonishment, it intrudes and invites and seizes up with its strangeness and its beauty.”69
Pope Benedict XVI points to the paradoxical beauty of Christ, both the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53 – “He had neither beauty, [nor] majesty, nothing to attract our eyes, no grace to make us delight in him” — and the Bridegroom of Psalm 45 – “You are the fairest of the children of men and grace is poured upon your lips.” As Suffering Servant, “in his Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes ‘to the very end’”.70 As Bridegroom, “the beauty of Truth appears in him, the beauty of God himself who draws us to himself and, at the same time captures us with the wound of Love, the holy passion (eros), that enables us to go forth together, with and in the Church his Bride, to meet the Love who calls us.”71
To see Christ’s coming in the flesh as the dawn of beauty is to see salvation as the re-impression upon humanity of the divine image after which it was created, and its restoration to the original
65 Navone notes that the Greek adjective kalos means good but also beautiful, as in attractive loveliness, goodness as perceived (36). 66 A term taken from W.B. Yeats' poem “Easter 1916,” quoted in Stoker, “Beauty as a Theological Concept,” 154. 67 LeNotre, “Flannery O'Connor's 'Parker's Back,'” 399. 68 Stoker, “Beauty as a Theological Concept,” 161. 69 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 335. 70 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Bendict XVI), “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty,” Message to the Communion and Liberation Meeting at Rimini (24-30 August 2002), paragraph 19. (In the absence of page numbers I will refer to paragraphs for this source.) 71 Ratzinger, “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty,” paragraph 2.
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beauty intended by the Father. Salvation in Christ is thus the recovery of a “concrete” form: “the salvific power of the incarnation lies not simply in its revelation of God’s form, but in its restoration of the human form, humanity's resumption – in Christ – of the divine image. . . . Christ effects a recapitulation . . . that refashions the human after its ancient beauty and thus restores it to the Father.”72 As the Father's perfect image, Jesus not only reveals God to humankind, but reveals humankind to itself, and refashions the image of God in us that has become tarnished by sin and death: “Christians are bidden to see in Christ at once the true form of God and the true shape of humanity, and to believe that the Father sees with pleasure his own very likeness in Jesus of Nazareth, even him crucified, and furthermore, consents to view all of humanity as gathered into the beauty of his Son.”73 The possibilities of the original Adamic image are surpassed by the “totally unexpected likeness to God” bestowed on us by Christ. 74
The stigmatization of Saint Francis is a powerful image of this reality. In his encounter on La Verna with the crucified Christ under the form of a Seraph, he is literally impressed and transformed by the touch of the Crucified into his image. Francis’s imitation of Christ in his poverty and compassion, and his disposition of loving contemplation prepare him to be receptive to this imprint.75 After receiving the stigmata, Francis attests to the overwhelming beauty, which has touched him: “You are beauty . . . You are beauty!”76
Revelation and the Aesthetic Experience
With Christ at the centre of all aesthetic experience, we can focus on how the beauty in created things unfolds to us depths of meaning beyond themselves. How is the beautiful perceived, and how does the beautiful affect the one perceiving it? In considering the aesthetic from the side of the subject, we note the qualities of the beautiful, and the effects of beauty on the perceiver. In so doing, we will consider in more detail what it is that the beautiful communicates and bestows.
Thomas Aquinas defines beauty as that which “pleases by its very apprehension”.77 The beautiful makes an appeal via the senses and intellect that we immediately find convincing and delightful.
72 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 325. 73 Ibid., 336. C.f. Navone, Towards a Theology of Beauty, 13. 74 Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, 60. 75 García-Rivera, Community of the Beautiful, 87-88. 76 John Paul II refers to this in his “Letter to Artists,” 5. 77 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 115.
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This delight is the “simultaneous surprise at and recognition of the beautiful”78 – a sense of wonder and pleasure at the distinctiveness and necessity of the particularity of the form, which had to be this and no other.
Aquinas and his teacher Albert the Great espouse that the appearance of beauty manifests the hidden, inner depths of a thing: “Where the essence of being of a thing manifests itself in outward appearance, there is beauty. The shining light of its essence has to overcome the opacity of its material density in order to make a thing beautiful.”79 Aquinas postulates the three conditions for beauty. In order for it to be present, he says, there must be: 1) claritas (clarity, luminosity, or splendour); 2) debita proportio/ consonantia (harmony, attunement, or due proportion); 3) integritas (integrity, wholeness, completeness, or perfection).80 It is illuminating to note that these aesthetic dimensions also have ethical applications; for example, a person who acts with integrity knows the good and chooses the good. In addition to these three conditions for beauty, as John Dadosky summarizes, Aquinas makes the following assertions:
1) Everything that exists participates in beauty: by virtue of existence, all beings are beautiful. 2) Everyone loves the beautiful: it is universally valued and desired. 3) The beautiful is pleasing when seen or apprehended: the senses and the mind admire beauty; beauty causes pleasure. 4) Beauty pertains to formal causality: it touches us at the level of intelligibility (senses and intellect) whereby we appreciate it in and of itself rather than attend to it because of its usefulness. 5)Beauty has to do with contemplation: it is a surplus added to being, which it is part of human nature to contemplate and to love.81 Does the beautiful have an objective meaning? In his book, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art, Richard Viladesau finds an ontological meaning in beauty related to the delight and joy of existence over and against the possibility of non-being. In an experience of the beautiful, “the self recognizes and is 'given over' to the joy of existence”.82 Being, says
78 LeNotre, “Flannery O'Connor's 'Parker's Back,'” 403. 79 Roten, “Mary and the Way of Beauty,” 116. 80 John Dadosky, “Every Being Is Beautiful,” Chapter 2 in The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty: A Lonergan Approach (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 40. 81 Dadosky, Eclipse, 80. 82 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 136.
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Viladesau, is “marked with non-being.” In the moment of the beautiful we contrast the joy of being with “the abyss of nonbeing experienced in the fragile, threatened character of human existence, for which it is possible not to be.” This delight afforded by the beautiful can be poignant and painful insofar as it is “the realization of finitude” and that which accompanies such a realization, the “acute aching longing to be.”83
According to Viladesau, beauty testifies to the joy that is part and parcel of existence, and that goes deeper and is more fundamental than “existential anxiety and suffering”. The aesthetic experience is an affirmation of the beauty of being in the face of finitude: “a deep-seated ‘yes’ to being – even in its finitude and moments of tragedy”.84 If joy and delight are integral to the beautiful, so too must be the longing, at times inconsolable, that often accompanies moments of great beauty. Theologically speaking, it must be the longing to enjoy the whole depths of meaning suggested and promised by the beautiful, but not to be yet fully grasped. The ephemeral nature of created beauty offers a taste but never leaves us wholly satisfied. “The beautiful wounds,” says Benedict XVI, “but this is exactly how it summons man to his final destiny.”85 Our desire for the eternal source of beauty, says Hart, constitutes our being.86 It compels us onward to its source and in so doing to probe its mystery ever more deeply: “The mystery of beauty involves a depth of meaning which can never be exhausted.”87
Wessel Stoker suggests that a secular experience of beauty “produces a sense of rapture,” and “can also have moral significance.” In the Christian aesthetic experience, where beauty is taken as “referring to God,” one experiences “being stamped by the holy or by religious transcendence.” For the Christian, this experience is “an anticipation of the Kingdom of God.”88
Creational Beauty
We will now consider the beauty to be found in two particular spheres of human experience: in the natural world, and in the arts. First, what does the beauty of creation say about God? How might nature’s beauty speak to us about the Creator/creature relationship?
83 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 138; 136. 84 Ibid., 137; 149. 85 Ratzinger, “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of the Beautiful,” paragraph 8. 86 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 192. 87 O'Collins, “The Beauty of Christ,” 9. 88 Stoker, “Beauty as a Theological Concept,” 169; 171.
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If the Incarnation is the foundation of theological aesthetics, surely the Genesis account of God’s affirmation of Creation must be a central supporting pillar. As John Navone puts it: “God sees all that God has made, and it is very good. It is good because God sees it, because God sees it as good. God’s vision is not a response to created beauty; it is its cause.”89 Just as the human artist implants something of his or her personality into an artwork, the traces of the goodness, truth, and beauty of the Divine Artist can be found in Creation.
Together with the Incarnation, in which God sanctifies all matter by entering into it, the doctrine of creation’s goodness insists on a Christian engagement with this world and its beauty; as L. Clifton Edwards puts it, “a creational-incarnational understanding of nature's ontology demands a theological engagement with the natural world around us.”90 Augustine recounts in the Confessions how he questioned the things of the world by his attention to them, and the response they gave was their beauty, which directed him back to their maker: “And with a great voice they cried out, ‘He made us’”. Beauty by its sheer existence in the world testifies to God and becomes, as Edwards suggests, “a sort of guiding principle or vade mecum to God.”91
In a basic sense, our incarnate nature means that “our knowledge of God is creationally mediated” – we must by necessity know God in and through the creation of which we are a part; and the possibility for this is guaranteed by the analogia entis.92 The aesthetically rich world, saturated in beauty and meaning, is presented to us a conduit for knowledge of God. Of course, the way that we experience the world also contributes to what we perceive in it. In the experience of the beautiful, our thought processes and emotions in making sense of beauty – in Edwards’s words, our “aesthetic rationality” – come into play, so that “beauty is a combined objective- subjective phenomenon.”93 Edwards believes that the ability to discern spiritual meaning in creation, integrated with our past experiences and the total human context, is a skill that must be developed: “Much as we develop the ability to skip stones or paint with perspective, we might also develop a spiritual aspect of human perception – spiritually oriented beauty skills that deepen and enrich our experiences, and enable us to begin to see aspects of God's nature
89 Navone, Towards a Theology of Beauty, 38. 90 L. Clifton Edwards, “Artful creation and aesthetic rationality: toward a creational theology of revelatory beauty,” Theology Today 69, no. 1 (April 2012), 63. 91 Ibid., 57. 92 Ibid., 57; 59. 93 Ibid., 60.
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displayed in a beautiful world.”94 We are not passive recipients of beauty then, but responsible for developing our innate capacity, the eyes to see and ears to hear: “As creation confronts us with its beauty, we should apply ourselves and our aesthetic rationality to the world in intellectually virtuous ways.”95 Edwards presents the discerning Christian as one constantly engaged in interpreting the data of creation's beauty and integrating it with the other sources of revelation.
For David Bentley Hart, the only way to apprehend creation is to contemplate and love its beauty, and in so doing, mirror the delight the Creator takes in it. As an “expression of the superabundant joy and agape of the Trinity,” “joy and love are its own grammar and its only ground,” and so the only way to interpret Creation. What one reads in it is “its aesthetic excessiveness, its unforced beauty” – a beauty that exists as a wholly gratuitous and undeserved gift, framed by grace. The biblical account presents Creation as a deliberate act of artistic, creative invention for its own sake. While creation is without necessity, a pure expression of love, in another sense, “it has been from eternity fitting to God's goodness to be a loving creator, manifesting his trinitarian love in creatures.”96 Moreover, in loving creation’s beauty, one learns a disinterested love that “receives all things not to hold onto, not ‘for me,’ but as beautiful in their own splendour”; a charity that “lets what is be in its otherness”.97 Hart describes in rhapsodic language Creation’s participation in God's goodness and the pull it exerts on the human being to seek out the transcendent beauty in which creation partakes:
Creation is, as its first word, a partaking in the inexhaustible goodness of God; and its ceaseless flow of light and shadow, constancy and change, mirrors both the 'music' of God's ordering words and the incomprehensibility of his changeless nature . . . , while the restless soul, immersed in the spectacle of God's glory, is drawn without break beyond the world to the source of its beauty, to embrace the infinite.98
94 Ibid., 70. 95 Ibid., 71. 96 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 254-6. 97 Ibid., 254-6. 98 Ibid., 195.
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Artistic Beauty
How do the arts mediate the sacred through beauty? As artists who create beauty – sub-creators, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s phrase99 – and as aesthetically driven creatures who contemplate, desire, and enjoy beauty in art, we ask, how do these pursuits connect us to God?
In his Theology and the Arts, Karl Rahner suggests that the arts fulfill or complete theology by filling in non-verbal aspects of the theological enterprise. This is so when it is granted that there is more to theology per se than verbal rational arguments: “If theology is not identified a priori with verbal theology, but is understood as man's total self-expression insofar as this is borne by God’s self-communication, then religious phenomena in the arts are themselves a moment within theology taken in its totality.”100 The aesthetic and the experiential, embodied in art, become irreplaceable sources of theological meaning: “One could take the position that what comes to expression in a Rembrandt painting or a Bruckner symphony is so inspired and borne by divine revelation, by grace and by God's self-communication, that they communicate something about what the human really is in the eyes of God which cannot be completely translated into verbal theology.”101 Only by means of art can that particular idea be communicated.
According to Gerardus van der Leeuw, each art form provides a different “point of access” to the holy102 by virtue of its own unique properties, all undergirded by Christ as the image of God. Viladesau notices art's ability to arouse feelings and moods similar to those connected to the encounter with the Holy – Rudolf Otto's mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery that both fascinates and inspires fearful awe. While for Otto, the religious experience is sui generis, Viladesau does not strictly delineate an aesthetic experience from a sacred experience: “The realm of the ‘sacred,’ in my view, is differentiated, not by its object, but by the fact that here the ‘ultimacy’ that is implicit in all human experience is recognized and spoken of explicitly.” In this view, insofar as art, sacred or secular, possesses a metaphysical resonance, it has something to do with the sacred, understood as that which is of ultimate value to our being: “nonsacred art and music may also mediate the presence of the transcendent without evoking associations with the
99 Cf. J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories” in Tree and Leaf (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964). 100 Karl Rahner, “Theology and the Arts.” Thought 57:224 (1982); 25. 101 Rahner, “Theology and the Arts,” 24-25. 102 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 25.
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religious realm, but instead by revealing the ‘metaphysical’ depths of secular human experience itself.”103
Aidan Nichols makes a similar point when speaking of the sense of an objective meaning, fundamental to existence, with which the arts confront us; “a meaning that is not arbitrarily thought up or subjectively foisted on the face of things but really there.” This truth, which grasps us, is beautiful. The presence in art of the indication towards the “source of being, the meaning of meaning,” he discerns to be a “shining through of divine presence,” and not at all exclusively in art which is overtly religious in conception, content, or purpose.104
The metaphysical function of art is related to the juncture in art of time and eternity. While existing here and now, in its particularity and ephemerality, a piece of music (for example) nonetheless taps in to the deep roots of what it is to be alive. Composer and listener are linked to one another and through their historical particularity and shared longing for eternity embodied in the aesthetic moment of the work.105 The poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s conviction that the artist's function is to “make the momentary eternal” is also revealed in a striking way in the crystalline simplicity yet expansive depth of Zen poetry, in which, as Viladesau says, “the present moment touches on eternity”.106 The longing and the tension in art, which seems to reach beyond itself for that which is no longer art, indicates the goal to which all being is drawn, of eternal happiness in union with eternal Beauty (God).
For Aidan Nichols, art is an extension both of Creation and of the Incarnation. Regarding art's relationship to Creation, he makes reference to Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism: “artistic creation ‘does not copy God's creation but continues it’”.107 The vocation of the artist is the perpetual recapitulation of beauty in matter, linked, explicitly for the Christian artist, with Christ’s coming in the flesh: “the calling of the Christian artist may be described as existential, and personal, but it is in the service of something objective and supra-personal, namely the ever renewed embodiment, using the means art provides, of the original Incarnation of God in
103 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 152. 104 Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, 146-7. 105 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 146. 106 Ibid., 154-6. 107 Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, 57.
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Christ.”108
Related to this, Aidan Nichols draws an interesting parallel between, as he puts it, “Christ and the Muses” – suggesting three similarities between the meaning of Christ’s presence in the flesh and what works of art can do:
1) Christ/Art reveals or discloses what the human world is like, and what it ought to be like.
2) Christ/Art is an enhancement of natural creation (a “new creation”).
3) Christ/Art discloses the meaning of the world as a whole, as a vehicle of divine presence.109
Pope John Paul II’s Letter to Artists (1999) eloquently addresses the unique vocation of artists and the importance of their calling to the Church and the world. In their creativity, artists gain a mysterious insight into God's creative action. In their relationship to beauty, which he calls “a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence,”110 artists bear the responsibility of incarnating the inexhaustible depths of the beautiful in forms that will speak to the world afresh. None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands. A glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in your eyes when—like the artists of every age— captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colours and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you.111
In one sense, all human beings are artists working to make a masterpiece from the raw materials of their lives: “all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life”.112 Creative artists hone their artistic skills in order to give substance to the intuitions and mysteries perceived in the moment of inspiration, beneath the surface of reality, by creating art that lifts us out of ourselves, above the everyday: “Every genuine artistic intuition goes beyond what the senses perceive and, reaching beneath reality's surface, strives to interpret its hidden mystery. The intuition itself springs from the depths of the human soul, where the desire to give meaning to one's own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of
108 Ibid., 65. 109 Nichols, Redeeming Beauty, 147-8. 110 John Paul II, “Letter to Artists,” 12. 111 Ibid., 1. 112 Ibid., 2.
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things.”113 The desire to capture something apprehended in that fleeting vision drives the artist. The work of the artist is never fulfilled since “their creating is no more than a glimmer of the splendour which flared for a moment before the eyes of their spirit”114 – yet it may offer a unique embodiment of, or perspective into, the unplumbable depths of that mystery of beauty.
While art even in secular contexts may image the invisible, offer entry points into an encounter with the “holy,” bring depths of meaning to the surface, and serve as a symbol of religious mystery, religious art explicitly seeks to engage the mystery of the transcendent. Pope John Paul II calls for “a new alliance” between artists and the Church, hoping for “a renewed 'epiphany' of beauty in our time”.115 The Church, he argues, needs art for its “unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colours, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look or listen. It does so without emptying the message itself of its transcendent value and its aura of mystery.”116 By the same token, he suggests, artists need the Church for the wellspring of beauty it offers as inspiration.
According to Viladesau, art functions in the religious sphere in three ways: 1) Art may express theological content, by illustrating or offering an interpretation of the gospel message (as in Michelangelo’s Pietà). 2) Art may embody or evoke ideas and feelings intrinsically related to the gospel message (as in Fauré's In Paradisum from the Requiem, or Handel's Messiah). 3) Art may create beauty in religious contexts and so raise the mind to God or mediate an encounter with the holy (as in spectacular Church architecture).117
These are by no means strictly separated categories; any one piece of religious art, it seems to me, sometimes fulfills more than one, or all, of these functions at once. With these categories in mind, religious art may also function didactically, through communicating an idea, or sacramentally, through making present.118 Paul Tillich’s categories help round out the spiritual possibilities of religious art. Tillich
113 Ibid., 5. 114 Ibid., 5. 115 Ibid., 9. 116 Ibid., 10, 11. 117 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 163. 118 Ibid., 172.
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delineates the stylistic elements of religious art which correspond to distinct types of religious experience: numinous realism, mystical/pantheistic, prophetic-protesting, critical realism, idealism, and ecstatic-spiritual.119 In each case, the religious artwork is a springboard into something beyond itself – whether that be a critical engagement with the injustice of the world, an experience of prayer or communion, or a theological insight.
Ultimately, the power of the arts, from a Christian perspective, to put us in touch with truth, finds its basis in Jesus’s incarnation and resurrection. Balthasar reminds us that, unlike a sign which points to something other than itself, Christ is the truth to which He points: the once-for-all, definitive form of God in the world. If, as Schiller says, beauty is “freedom in its appearing,” then Christ’s beauty is God’s freedom.120 The Risen Lord is truly, bodily alive — in Him the infinite and spiritual merges with and transfigures the finite and physical. Balthasar finds in this a justification for aesthetics and perhaps all art-making, in that the beautiful temporal thing can indeed manifest the eternal: “the resurrection of the flesh vindicates the poets in a definitive sense: the aesthetic scheme of things, which allows us to possess the infinite within the finitude of form . . . is right.”121
Musical Beauty
The longing for what is beyond that characterizes the arts is present perhaps most palpably in music. Viladesau would agree: “there is at the heart of every deep aesthetic experience – and perhaps particularly in music – an intense feeling of striving toward something beyond the moment.”122 Music, existing within the constraints and possibilities of time, readily expresses the desire to break free of time’s limitations: “As time is the moving image of eternity, so music exemplifies the soul's time-bound character and its yearning for union with eternal and wholly self-present being.”123 Music in Western thought has a rich history as a symbol of the ordering principle of the universe, in its audible form a “sensible mirror of the deeper musical order expressed in both the harmony of the human body and soul and in the inaudible ‘music of the
119 Paul Tillich, Writings in the Philosophy of Cutlure, Kulturphilosophische Schrifen, ed. Michael Palmer (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1990), 317-29. Referenced in Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 176-7. 120 Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, 154. 121 Ibid., 155. 122 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 149. 123 Ibid., 180.
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spheres’ (musica mundana).”124 In this conceit, the universe unfolds as a masterpiece of musical harmony, of which the music of voices and instruments are a reflection. In David Bentley Hart’s words, the “melody and cadence of the cosmic elements in their intermingling sing of God’s glory, as does the interrelation of motion and rest within created things; and in this sympathy of all things one with the other, music in its truest and most perfect form is bodied forth.”125 While reflecting the order and beauty of creation, music can also be said to communicate through association: representing the emotive life, symbolizing and evoking feelings and states of mind through physical effects and sympathy in the listener.
According to García-Rivera, despite his emphasis on sight (seeing the form), hearing is the “central act of theological aesthetics” for von Balthasar. “Sight . . . belongs more to the eschatological, e.g., the beatific vision”.126 Sound, because it remains evanescent, is, in this life, more central to the experience of faith: “Faith ‘sees’ but only in having ‘heard.’”127 Meanwhile, David Bentley Hart finds in music an analogy for the harmonious Trinitarian life and creation as a profusion of that life, existing “polyphonically” within it, just as the contrapuntal texture of a fugue allows for various musical lines to exist in harmony without sacrificing the “peace” by which the music is governed. “As God is Trinity, in whom all difference is possessed as perfect peace and unity, the divine life might be described as infinite music, and creation too might be described as a music whose intervals, transitions, and phrases are embraced within God’s eternal, triune polyphony.”128 The musical theme of the Trinitarian life, already infinitely rich in the “inexhaustible variety of its phrasings and harmonies,” is taken up and spun out by creation as “a complementary music, an endless sequence of variations upon the theme of God's eternal love”.129 In this metaphor, rather than seeing the consummation of creation as a state beyond music – an engulfing silence in which there is no more to be heard – “Christian eschatology promises only more and greater harmony, whose developments, embellishments, and movement never end and never ‘return’ to a state more original than music.”130 This is a music that never
124 Ibid., 150. 125 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 274-5. 126 García-Rivera, Community of the Beautiful, 83. 127 Ibid., 83. 128 Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 274. 129 Ibid., 277. 130 Ibid., 284.
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ceases – the beauty of the polyphony begun in this life only grows ever more complex and wonderful in the next.
It is my contention, following the distinction made by Albert Blackwell in his book, The Sacred in Music,131 that, given music’s unique properties and potentialities, musical mediation of theological beauty takes place through both sensory and intellectual means. This is borne out through a consideration of the way in which we perceive and encounter music, on sonic and mental planes, since, as George Steiner recognizes, music is capable of engaging us in both of these ways: “Music is at once cerebral in the highest degree . . . and it is at the same time somatic, carnal and a searching out of resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness.”132 While this division is admittedly somewhat artificial, since music affects us in many ways simultaneously, it is helpful for clarity’s sake to consider both of these aspects separately. We turn now to consider these twofold aspects of musical beauty, in light of the foregoing.
The Sensuous Beauty of Music: The Incarnational Tradition “O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed . . .” (Jeremiah 20:7)
The sensory nature of music is perhaps the most obvious place to begin. In the power of music over our moods and feelings, its ability to trigger memories and states of mind, its ability to incite dance and motion, music possesses a kind of primal immediacy that attracts human beings on physical and emotional levels. Even the most heady or lofty of compositions is still bound up in the medium of time and subject to the acoustical properties that allow it to be received by the ear and registered as musical by the listener. The immediate, sonic nature of music means that it is efficient at capturing our attention and drawing us under its sway.
In his essay “Beauty in Music,” Claude-Steffen Mahnkopf relates the innate attraction of music with its beauty, referring to what he sees as a general consensus that music as an art form is beautiful and thus desirable. Music, he claims, by its most general definition, is beautiful in an emphatic sense. No one
131 Albert L. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999). The terms “Incarnational” and “Pythagorean” in the subsections that follow are also derived from Blackwell’s book. 132 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 217.
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would say this of any other art form. In literature, poetry, painting or architecture, one certainly speaks of individual works as beautiful, but hardly the entire field. Only in music do agony and ecstasy ensue to a degree that recalls phases of unrestrained amorous infatuation. The emphasis with which music as such is viewed as beautiful is comparable only to such statements as “Life is beautiful” or “Sex is beautiful” (sentiments that are acknowledged by the majority of people).133
Mahnkopf describes the hold music has over us as quasi-erotic, in that it seduces and evokes desire by virtue of the means proper to itself: “The validity claim of beauty reveals itself as an erotic-libidinous quality, a seductive power to make itself desirable and worthy of love by means of music-specific, significative properties.”134
It is precisely because music so attracts, absorbs, and transfixes our physical selves that it has been mistrusted and seen as dangerous in Western theological history. The Church Fathers agonized over using music in the context of worship, weighing its ability to unite and inspire, against its seductive charm and associations with (pagan) frenzy and anti-intellectual abandon. This tension is at play in Augustine, a lover of music though he is. Despite the fact that the music of the church was arguably instrumental in his conversion,135 and that he continued to be moved to devotion by it, he cannot shake the feeling of doubt regarding it: Thus I fluctuate between the danger of pleasure and the experience of the beneficent effect . . . that through the delights of the ear the weaker mind may rise up towards the devotion of worship. Yet when it happens to me that the music moves me more than the subject of the song, I confess myself to commit a sin deserving punishment, and then I would prefer not to have heard the singer.136
For Augustine, the power of music over our senses is dangerous in that it may cause us to become entangled in the sensible realm, so seduced by sensible beauty we forget God’s beauty, to which it merely points. He would (almost) rather give up music altogether than have it tantalize only to mislead and bar our passage to the divine.
133 Claude-Steffen Mahnkopf, “Beauty in Music,” in The Many Faces of Beauty, ed. Vittorio Hösle (Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2013), 395. 134 Mahnkopf, “Beauty in Music,” 395. 135 Brian Brennan points out the prominence of music in the conversion narrative, from the sing-song voice of the child (“Tolle lege”) to the psalm and hymn singing that served as reinforcement to his decision. “Augustine’s De Musica.” Vigiliae Christianae 42 (1988), 268. 136 Augustine, Confessions, 208.
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This kind of negative association with musical beauty as a seductive and thus destructive force is a trope that presents itself in the Odyssey with the Song of the Sirens: an irresistibly enticing, seducing, “clear-voiced song” that draws ships off course, to peril and disaster. Symbolically, we might see it as the triumph of sensual beauty over rationality and thus a loss of control, as Elizabeth Eva Leach describes: “Beautiful sound causes the individual subject – Odysseus – to confront a conflict between desire and discipline. . . . Beautiful music defeats reason, removes self-control, and is therefore mortally dangerous.”137 Interestingly, in the case of the Odyssey, the loss of self-possession is linked to a giving in to the seductive/destructive call of sonic musical beauty.
Is there a way to reclaim musical beauty, in all its sensuality, as a viable way to encounter God? In doing so, it would seem essential to remember that – despite Augustine’s fear that it might cause us to remain bogged down in the flesh and miss the hidden beauty of God of which it is a sign – sensory beauty, the glorious fact remains, is indeed a signifier and mediator of God’s beauty. Carol Harrison adeptly summarizes Augustine’s ambiguity: So, on the one hand the alliance of beauty and matter can be seen in a negative way: matter is subject to the mind; beauty in matter can be taken as an ultimate in itself and can cause man to sin. On the other hand, the fact that matter can incarnate and, so to speak, mediate ultimate beauty, makes their alliance a very positive thing.138
The Incarnation of God in Christ is the sublime model for this alliance of beauty and matter, and the ultimate vindication of all artistic beauty – the difference being, of course, that Christ the Incarnate Word is that Beauty which he signifies, whereas a beautiful motet, symphony, or snatch of melody is related to its Signified only as a dim reflector. Still, beauty “here-below” as it were, functions and comes about in an analogous way as the Son’s revelation in the flesh.
When it comes to musical beauty, it is our experience of it through our senses that allows us to experience physically and emotionally something of the spiritual reality that it describes. In a religious setting – but not exclusively so – music is capable of engaging our senses in order to direct them to God. This view of music, according to Richard Viladesau, is founded on the idea
137 Elizabeth Eva Leach, “The Sound of Beauty,” in Beauty, eds. Lauren Arrington, Zoe Leinhardt, Philip Dawid. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 74. 138 Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 271.
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that the music “we hear on earth gives us a sensible taste of the spiritual order and finality of all being and, in its truest nature, expresses the praise of and desire for God.”139
In sum, then, the sensory nature of music meets and entices us on a physical level. If we can avoid the pitfall of finding in sensory beauty an end in itself, it can direct us on to its source. Undergirding the possibility of an encounter with God in sensory beauty is Christ’s own Incarnation, through which Beauty itself became enfleshed and appeared in matter.
The Intelligible Beauty of Music: The Pythagorean Tradition Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone . . . –John Keats, “Ode to a Grecian Urn”140
Alongside the sensuous beauty in music as a potential gateway to God, music has the capacity to communicate super-sonically, via the intellectual path. In distinguishing these two models, Albert Blackwell refers to sounded music as the “visibilium” of the Credo, while the inaudible principle of music aligns with the “invisibilium.” While audible music impacts us physically, this “inaudible” music communicates to our cerebral, logical selves. According to this line of thinking, perfect music transcends sound (and thereby bypasses the dangers associated with corporeality) and has its real potency in its association with a mystical conception of number.
In the Pythagorean tradition, number is the foundational building block of all creation. It is eternally true (mathematical truths are true always and everywhere) and immaterial, but interacts with the material world as the ordering principle of the universe. Pythagoras is said to have made the discovery that sound is mathematical in nature and the quintessential manifestation of number, by demonstrating that musical pitches are related by simple numerical ratios.141
Drawing on these Pythagorean concepts, Augustine identifies super-sensual beauty with God’s Wisdom that bestows proportion, harmony, and order on all creation, in keeping with the
139 Richard Viladesau, Theology and the Arts: Encountering God Through Music, Art, and Rhetoric, 36. 140 Published 1820. Accessed online at
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Wisdom tradition: “you have arranged all things by measure and number and weight” (Wis. 11:20). “Wisdom,” says St. Augustine, “gave number to all objects. . .; all objects, even the least ones, have their own numbers.”142 For Augustine, “[t]he rules of numbers and of beauty are the same”;143 and furthermore, “[T]he universe is at every level formed into beauty by the pervasive power of number.”144 Numerositas, the beauty of number, conceived in the mind of God, is at work in all things, making itself known through all beings and all things that are pleasing: Wherever you turn, wisdom speaks to you through the imprint it has stamped upon its works. . . . Look at the sky, the earth, and the sea, and at whatever in them shines from above or crawls, flies, or swims below. These have form because they have number. . . .Ask next what moves the limbs of the artist himself, and it will be number. . . .If you ask what is pleasant in dancing, number will answer you, “Behold, it is I.”145
The contemplation of the order, proportion, and harmony that brought about, and that underlie, all things is in itself pleasing to the intellect. But beyond that, in the Christian sphere, this kind of intellectual apprehension of beauty through number reveals God as the One who set into motion a supremely well-ordered creation and who sustains it all.
Because music is numerical in a unique way, it embodies and so allows us to perceive the principle of numerositas ordering all things. “Here music is understood as the highest expression of that orderly relationship of numbers on which the universe is founded, the purest echo of the ‘heavenly numbers.’”146 Bruno Forte articulates Augustine’s understanding of the principle of music in the Pythagorean tradition as a microcosm or mirror of the cosmic order willed by God: [Music], inasmuch as it is the ordered measure of the numerical unities, mirrors the cosmic order intended by the Creator. . . . Thus understood, music elevates, because it leads the hearer into an awareness of the divine Logos of the world and, in echoing the cosmic order, is able to give expression to souls united in harmony before and in God.147
We encounter in this connection the notion that “well-proportioned” music could affect and
142 Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, quoted in Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 55. 143 Kathi Meyer-Baer, “Psychologic and Ontologic ideas in Augustine's De Musica,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 2, no. 3 (March 1953): 225. 144 Robert J. O'Connell, Art and the Christian Intelligence in St. Augustine (Mass: Harvard University Press, 1978), 67. 145 Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, quoted in Blackwell, The Sacred in Music, 44. 146 Forte, The Portal of Beauty, 80. 147 Ibid., 81.
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influence the moral state of human beings.148 Musica humana, the ethical notion of music, entails that human lives be in tune with the musica mundana. “All things being equal, beautiful music ennobles one’s character.”149
In reality, not all music reflects the wisdom of the cosmic order to the same degree. Yet, it is still true that by virtue of its very nature as music, it “contains in some way the divine patterning. . . . In even the most degraded music known to Augustine some faint suggestion of the divinely ordered pattern could be dimly perceived.”150 In the final analysis, as Gerardus van der Leeuw proclaims, even the most exquisite earthly music pales in comparison with the perfection of music in the eternal glorification of God in heaven: The highest and best music is that which is more than music; not that which sounds with voice and instruments, but that which our voices and instruments remind us of. . . The heavenly song cannot be heard on earth; it is that canor of which the mystics speak, the song which sounds first above, then within, the human being. Earthly music can only remind us distantly of this song. The most beautiful music is only an echo of the eternal Gloria.151
As we have seen, it is possible to glimpse traces (or perhaps dim reflections, seen “through a glass darkly”) of God’s beauty through the medium of music – a beauty that communicates to us through the senses, as an extension of the Incarnation, and the intellect, as the ordering, harmonizing principle at work in every facet of the universe.
We now move, by way of summary and application of the ideas put forward in this chapter, to a consideration of four musical moments of great beauty.
148 Brennan, “Augustine’s De Musica,” 271. 149 Joan L. Roccasalvo, “Beauty, Beethoven’s Fifth, and the Experience of Faith,” Irish Theological Quarterly 73 (2008): 374. 150 Brennan, “Augustine’s De Musica,” 275. 151 Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 261.
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Musical Recap: Christ’s Intimate Beauty in Mozart and Ešenvalds
W.A. Mozart, “Kyrie” and “Et incarnatus est” from Great Mass in C Minor, K. 427152 The beauty of Mozart is a trustworthy beauty; it is taken as a given, a fact of life, even a touchstone of what musical beauty is. It seems not to be an exaggeration to say that we put our faith in the music of Mozart consistently to provide us with profound beauty. With him we know we are in safe hands, even if we cannot articulate why we are so moved by his reliable beauty. Attempts to pin down what it is that makes Mozart’s music so universally cherished and acknowledged as a kind of safe haven of the beautiful must, in the final analysis, necessarily fall short: as Roman Ivanovitch writes, “There are surely few subjects more ineffable, simultaneously attractive and resistant of explanation, than the notion of the beautiful in Mozart”.153 His music moves us by a power, it must be admitted, “beyond the grasp of scholarship.”154 For this reason, there is something in Mozart that seems to turn the conversation in the direction of the heavenly, of the divine. In the lovingly written (and evocatively-titled) Mozart’s Grace, musicologist Scott Burnham describes the qualities in Mozart that seem to warrant this movement: “Perhaps the perception of welcoming goodness, unalloyed benevolence, unstinting generosity lures us into the language of divinity — the divine at its most approachable; not just a forgiving, but a giving, divinity.”155 Karl Barth, a great Mozart aficionado, imagines the angels in heaven playing Mozart for sheer enjoyment, “en famille.”156 Theologians such as Barth, von Balthasar,157 Hans Küng,158 and Benedict XVI159 have found in his music an unmistakable pulse of divine beauty. For Barth, the beauty of Mozart is deeply
152 A recording with Barbara Bonney, soprano, Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, can be found at the following link, which contains the two movements at the times indicated: “Kyrie”
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related to an honest and simple expression of the joy of being, uncalculated praise (like birdsong or like the play of children) for the sheer fact of existence: Mozart’s music is not, in contrast to that of Bach, a message, and not, in contrast to that of Beethoven, a personal confession. He does not reveal in his music any doctrine and certainly not himself. . . . Mozart does not wish to say anything: he just sings and sounds. Thus he does not force anything on the listener, does not demand that he makes any decisions or take any positions; he simply leaves him free. . . . [He simply proclaims the praise of God] precisely in that humility in which he himself is, so to speak, only the instrument with which he allows us to hear what he hears: what surges at him from God’s creation, what rises in him, and must proceed from him.160
Though it may touch us profoundly, Mozart’s music is never weighty or burdensome but always gives the impression of lightness and innocence. Mozart’s beauty is related to ontological joy and freedom – the pure joy of being alive. Even in Mozart’s stormiest moments, there is a lightness of touch that never surrenders to despair. He remains, in our minds, the “eternal child.” Together with its pure expression of the joy of being is a freshness and a lightness that refreshes and lifts up the spirit: “Mozart’s music always sounds unburdened, effortless, light. This is why it unburdens, releases, and liberates us.”161
Balthasar speaks of the universality and unfathomable depths of Mozart’s beauty such that, “Like everything that is truly great, it is available to all and everyone without grudging . . . . What enters the ear of the superficial listener with pleasure the very first time he hears it arouses tears as an inexplicable miracle of beauty, even the thousandth time in the true lover.”162
Barth wonders if Mozart’s music even contains “the primal sound of music absolutely”163 — the seed of a kind of prototype of musical perfection, as in the original sense of the word, to be “made through, or complete.” In other words, Scott Burnham states, Barth suggests that “Originary perfection is somehow made incarnate in Mozart’s music”164 — a perfection of form, a timelessness, and a pointing beyond to the eternal (a rather “Pythagorean” interpretation).
While it might be argued that examples of spiritually-uplifting beauty in Mozart’s music abound
160 Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 37. 161 Ibid., 47. 162 Balthasar, “The Farewell Trio,” 785-6. 163 Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 25. 164 Scott G. Burnham, Mozart’s Grace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 18.
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almost ad absurdum, I have chosen to highlight two moments from his Great (unfinished) Mass in C Minor, K. 427, as particularly moving exemplars. The sacred texts in these examples help to bring the matter into even clearer focus.
The first, which Burnham calls “[o]ne of the more astonishing vocal passages in Mozart’s sacred music,” is the “Christe eleison” section of the “Kyrie” from Mozart’s C Minor Mass. The passage moves us seamlessly, following from the dramatic, C minor opening, with its pleading vocal gestures (“Lord, have mercy”) into a place of refreshing radiance and light, in the relative major (E-flat). A solo soprano voice, supported by a hushed choir and light strings, invokes the Saviour more personally (“Christ, have mercy”) with infinitely delicate, gentle, loving grace and simplicity. (See Figure 3.1.)
Figure 3.1. The transition from C minor to E-flat major and the beginning of the soprano solo.
Burnham describes the effect of the melodic contour of the soprano line, which disarms and enchants in its very simplicity (see Figure 3.2): On paper, what happens in bars 38-42 of the solo soprano’s part is unassuming stuff: she traces a fully diatonic, straightforward arc over a simple harmonic circuit. And yet the result feels extravagant, like a frisson of ecstasy. The whole notes in the first two bars are like a staging area, the soprano’s long, low tones gathering energy for the unfettered steps to come. The arc itself is launched in the third bar, a parabola whose peak coincides with the most colorful harmony yet in the phrase. . . . a simple, graceful gesture, ravishing in its execution. Unbelievable enough, the soprano then sings yet another arc, at an even higher level of intensity (bars 44-46).165
165 Burnham, Mozart’s Grace, 21-22.
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Figure 3.2. The “simple, graceful… ravishing” melodic arc of the soprano.
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The arcs of the melodic phrase are balanced to perfection, rises and falls undulating with a tremendous sense of proportion and rightness. At bars 51-54, the soprano voice rebounds in an almost outrageous leap spanning two octaves, balancing out the low, long tones, disarming us once again with its sensuousness (see Figure 3.3).
Figure 3.3. Low tones balanced out by a two octave leap up.
The final phrase of the solo (bars 64-71) extends the word “eleison” on a ravishing melisma, lengthening it to the point where the sheer warmth and grace of the melodic line leave the text behind and ascend to an exalted, spirit-filled, wordless exchange with Christ (see Figure 3.4).
Figure 3.4. Melismatic extension of the word “eleison.”
Burnham comments on the paradoxical combination of sensuality and purity in this passage: It is always a shock to encounter such voluptuous music in the context of a sacred Kyrie. But it is even more shocking to be ravished by a vocal gesture that in the naïve purity of its linear course is so paradoxically innocent. This combination of sensuous motion and innocent bearing suggests an ironic state of
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being that is both artless and knowing.166
Such exquisite sensuality met with disarming innocence is evident in the tenth movement of the work, the “Et incarnatus est,” scored for solo soprano and strings with obbligato winds lending a serene, guileless quality. The text —“And he was incarnate of the Holy Spirit, and became man” — is the section of the Creed at which, liturgically, worshippers bow or kneel in reverence for the mystery of the Word’s becoming flesh. The music seems also to genuflect, with extraordinary reverence, but in no way dour or solemn — this is music of heartrending warmth, love, even bliss. Exquisite, radiant, and tender, it seems to shimmer and soar, savouring the mystery of the Incarnation with quiet, rapturous joy.
Palpable, too, is a sense of longing, apparent even at a micro level of the suspension (leaning into the note D, a non-chord tone coming across like an appoggiatura and falling to resolve) that characterizes the main melodic motive (bars 19-20; see Figure 3.5). This is echoed in a variety of ways throughout the movement: notably, the quarter notes moving to eighths on beat one of bars 30, 31, and 32 (see Figure 3.6); and in the ascending sequence at the beginning of the cadenza, in the interplay of solo voice and oboe (bars 92-96; see Figure 3.7).
Figure 3.5. Appoggiatura gesture in the main motive (m. 19-20).
166 Burnham, Mozart’s Grace, 22.
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Figure 3.6. Development of the appoggiatura motive (m. 30-31).
Figure 3.7. Further development of the appoggiatura motive in the byplay between voice and oboe (m.92-95.)
The freedom, lightness, and grace so evident in the opening “Christe eleison” soprano solo are also abundant here in this movement, as is the personal, heartfelt sense of loving relation to and reverence for Christ. It even indirectly echoes the two almost shockingly beautiful moments referenced above: first, during the second phrase of the second articulation of the main theme, an unexpectedly affecting leap, this time of an octave up to a high C, above a surprising harmonic move to the dominant 7th of ii (bar 66; see Figure 3.8), on the word “factus”; and second, an even more extensive melisma during the cadenza (bars 92-113) during which time seems suspended along with language (as we almost lose track of the word the soloist is singing). This extensive melisma, similar to the concluding melisma of the “Christe eleison” solo, seems to depart from the world of language, caught up entirely in musical expression. The voice becomes a partner to the obbligato wind instruments, exchanging phrases with them. Ivanovitch refers to it as “the extraordinary cadenza . . . where, shedding all verbal sense in a huge melisma (possibly the longest Mozart ever composed), the soprano joins the obbligato instruments in a four-part
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tour de force of contrapuntally braided lines.”167
Figure 3.8. Octave leap in the melody above V7/ii.
One moment in the cadenza is especially affecting and deserving of comment: a surprising, deceptive move in bar 100 to ♭VI (D-flat), which subverts the listener’s expectation not only harmonically but in terms of phrase length, coming as it does at the conclusion of a sequence. Ivanovitch finds in this moment, with its visceral power, a key connection to the incarnational meaning of the movement: Partly a technical necessity, to prevent the dominant pedal from folding back to the tonic, and partly an affective darkening of colour. . . it also elongates the phrase by a bar, just at the point where we expect the soloist’s breath to give out. The extension has a visceral impact and goes to the heart of the meaning of the cadenza, and ultimately of the movement itself. For at the same time that the soloist leaves words behind and is treated almost as a purely instrumental force, we are aware as never before of the singing body itself, of breath and strain. The ethereal becomes the carnal, and the mystery of that transformation – a mystery to which Mozart is invariably pulled – is made palpable: et homo factus est. The copious modes of virtuosity, performative and compositional, here transcend mere technique and signal something deeper.168
The listener is enraptured by these two moments in Mozart’s mass (the “Christe eleison” and the “Et incarnatus est”), drawn to them with an awed reverence, as though standing in the presence of something holy. The two musical passages stand out and seem to be connected to one another, each suspended in time as perfect, untouchable gems, and yet glowing with an inviting warmth that beckons, asking to be encountered and welcomed. They are moments to which listeners who know Mozart’s mass well look forward, bristling with anticipation as they approach. What sets
167 Ivanovitch, “Mozart’s Art,” 23. 168 Ibid.
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them apart?
Certainly the solo soprano voice, which comes across as tender and personal in contrast to the collective choral material (“Kyrie;” “Credo”) immediately preceding both moments, is something they outwardly share. Mozart composed this Mass as an offering of thanksgiving following his marriage and as wedding gift for his wife, and evidently had her voice in mind for one or both of the excerpts we are reviewing, the “Christe eleison” solo and “Et incarnatus est”169 — which makes their tenderness especially poignant. On a deeper level, the music’s overall sense of intimacy signals the intimate and generous beauty of Christ as God made flesh, who lowers himself in order to be close to us. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that both passages focus thematically on Christ as the One with whom the human soul is in loving personal relation. The “Christe eleison” names Him, asking for mercy in a manner full not of desperation, but of warm assurance; it no longer seems to be a plea for something lacking but an acknowledgement of something already possessed and graciously given. David Greene provides one listener’s description of identifying with the music here: In the “Christe eleison,” the somber feeling of being in need of mercy and moving (march-like) towards judgment that characterized the “Kyrie eleison” disappears; “only the positive, affirming relation with the Lord is left. Awareness of the rift and the malaise is so completely absent that I am not aware of having been healed. The means of healing the separation is named (‘Christe’). I am simply related to Christ, and so fully related that the need for healing does not exist.”170 Similarly, in the “Et incarnatus est,” the music meditates upon and glorifies the profound mystery of the Incarnation, simply by basking in its radiant wonder, and allowing it to be — a true “heart-pondering” in the light cast by its beauty. The reference to Maria Virgine reinforces this sense. Finally, as with all beautiful things, there is a deep sense of rightness. Everything about the movement — each individual element and the way each one comes together to form the whole — is precisely as it should be. At the same time, the very sense of “perfection” that such beauty gives, creates a parallel sense of longing for the true perfection that lies beyond it. Hence, an irony — the beauty and fittingness of this music quench our thirst for beauty even while instilling in us a deeper desire for a beauty all the more
169 Ivanovitch, “Mozart’s Art,” 22. Constanze did indeed perform it at Salzburg in October 1783. 170 David Greene, “Mozart’s Mass in C Minor: Becoming the Music and Relating to God.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 13:1 (2013), 100-117; 101. These reflections are taken from the journal of a non-specialist friend of the author, upon listening to the mass.
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profound, lasting, and real, the Beauty that truly satisfies.
Ēriks Ešenvalds: Passion and Resurrection, Part IV, and O Salutaris Hostia171 From the reliable beauty of Mozart, we move to the work of a contemporary composer, whose voice has something new to offer us in the way of beauty. Far removed from Mozart in time, space, and musical language, I believe his work too can mediate for us an encounter with the same transcendent Beauty.
Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds (born 1977) is steadily gaining a reputation in the choral world for his creative, often multilayered, colouristically rich compositions. Ešenvalds studied at a theological seminary before deciding to devote himself to music, and he “remains deeply religious,”172 which is revealed by his engagement as a music minister at a Baptist church in Riga and his setting a number of sacred texts.173 His works reveal interests in and inspiration from nature, myth and legend, along with spiritual and religious themes and imagery. Not only in his sacred pieces, but in many of his secular, too, according to Gabriel Jackson, “there is also an apprehension of the divine . . . —the divine as seen in the night sky, in the stars, in the heavens. Ēriks Ešenvalds is a dreamer, he gazes up and dreams—of eternity, of paradise, of that better world onto which music can offer a magical window, and he shows us that better world with rare beauty and spiritual integrity.”174
I wish to dwell here on two samples of Ešenvalds’s musical output, moments I find to be strikingly, touchingly, reverently beautiful, in sonic landscape and spiritual reference alike. Like the two Mozartian moments above, these too (consciously) deal with, and arguably represent for the listener, an intimate, personal encounter with Jesus.
171 Recordings can be found as follows: Passion and Resurrection, Part IV with Kristīne Gailīte, soprano, State Choir Latvija, and the Symphony orchestra of Liepāja, conducted by Māris Sirmais:
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The first comes from Ešenvalds’s 2005 oratorio, Passion and Resurrection,175 a unique, reflective, collage-style retelling of the passion story that presents “an interlocking mosaic of texts from the gospels, from Byzantine and Roman liturgies and from the Old Testament.”176 Musically, too, Ešenvalds traverses centuries, employing compositional techniques and styles from throughout music (and Christian) history. The forces employed are soprano soloist, SS soloists, SATB quartet, SATB chorus, and string orchestra.177
The final part of the four-part work concludes with the evocation of an exchange between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb on Easter morning (John 20). The atmosphere created by this reunion is at once supremely mystical and poignantly touching. It portrays for us, through music, the way in which Beauty, in the person of the Risen Lord, calls us by name.
Figure 3.9. The choir speaks in the words of the (yet unrecognized) Risen Jesus.
175 Score excerpts from Ēriks Ešenvalds, Passion and Resurrection, published by Musica Baltica, 2007. Reprinted by permission. 176 Vance Wolverton, “Ēriks Ešenvalds: Latvia’s Choral Enfant Extraordinaire.” The Choral Journal 53:4 (2012), 22-43; 28. 177 Patrick J.J. Callaghan, “The Imitation of Roman Catholic and Byzantine Chant in Ēriks Ešenvalds’s Passion and Resurrection” (2015). (Doctoral thesis.) Theses and Dissertations—Music. 46.
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The passage I wish to highlight begins at bar 75, with the SATB quartet, in the words of Jesus, asking Mary (in simple homophony), “Woman, why weepest thou? Woman, whom seekest thou?” (See Figure 3.9.) The solo soprano (bar 80) returns Mary’s uneasy response (still resigned to sorrow), on a single pitch, in a speech-like manner (giving an impression of “being frozen in astonishment”): “Sir, if thou hast borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away” (Figure 3.10).
Figure 3.10. Mary’s tentative recitative.
At this point, the SATB quartet begins to repeat “Mariam,” with gentle, regular insistence, on a single pitch. The full choir, a radiant echo, takes this up and settles into a two-chord, oscillating “Mariam” (Bmaj7/D# to E6/9), antiphonal with the quartet. As Mary’s name (in Aramaic, to emphasize familiarity) is chanted with utmost calm and irresistible attractiveness, Mary is surrounded on all sides with lapping waves of assurance, comfort, joy, peace, and ultimately of being fully known. As recognition and unspeakable joy dawn upon Mary, the solo soprano sings her response: a loving, lofty, gently rapturous repetition of the name the One who, she now recognizes, is calling her: “Rabboni.” This exchange is repeated, supported by smooth, ascending lines in the strings, until all fades and the work draws to a close (see Figure 3.11). No dramatic conclusion here; this meditative passion ends on a quiet, intimate note, the bliss of resurrection captured in this personal and tender moment of recognition and joy beyond telling. Gabriel Jackson comments on the beauty, transcendence, cyclicism, and the symbolic ambiguity of this “ending”: [The quartet’s] rapt repetitions of ‘Mariam’ draw in the choir, hesitant at first yet ultimately glowing as they settle into a gentle oscillation of two chords; the voice of Mary Magdalene soars above them with quiet radiance. Over and over again they call to each other, hypnotic and serene, as a luminescent string chorale slowly ascends to the heights. Yet there is an ambiguity at the very end—which of the two chords is perceived as the “tonic”? This lack of finality is essential, for the story must, and will,
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Figure 3.11. The dialogue of Jesus (Quartet and Choir) and Mary Magdalene (Solo Soprano). Ascending lines in the strings. The antiphonal “Mariams” create a sense of being surrounded. The ending lacks a sense of finality.
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begin again.178
While beautiful in and of itself, this scene painted by this passage of music is one of utmost relevance and meaning for the Christian. In it, Christ, who is True Beauty, calls upon one of His beloved disciples and friends. He calls her by her own name, and there is promise, invitation, and assurance in His call; there is the revelation of the life He offers that cannot be overcome by death.
Beset by Beauty, Mary hears her name called, and recognizes and receives who it is that speaks to her. She responds in beauty, adoringly singing His name back to Him. He has empowered her to lift up her voice, awakened her song, and she fits her melody into the framework of His love and His call. The compelling beauty and simplicity with which Ešenvalds has portrayed this scene through music breaks it open for listeners to enter into for themselves — to hear, recognize, and respond to beauty in their own way.
A second example from Ešenvalds’s corpus is his setting of the traditional text “O Salutaris Hostia.” The text forms part of a Eucharistic hymn by St. Thomas Aquinas, originally written for the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi (1264), and is especially associated with the Roman Catholic liturgical practice of Exposition, Adoration, and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.
Table 3: Text and translation of O Salutaris Hostia179 O salutaris Hostia, O Saving Victim, opening wide Quæ cæli pandis ostium: The gate of heaven to all below. Bella premunt hostilia, Our foes press on from every side; Da robur, fer auxilium. Thine aid supply, Thy strength bestow.
Uni trinoque Domino To Thy great name be endless praise Sit sempiterna gloria, Immortal Godhead, One in Three; Qui vitam sine termino Oh, grant us endless length of days, Nobis donet in patria. Amen. In our true native land with Thee. Amen.
Ešenvalds’s setting for SSAATTBB choir and two soprano soloists (2009)180 is a 3.5-
178 Gabriel Jackson, liner notes to Ešenvalds: Passion and Resurrection, Carolyn Sampson, Polyphony, Britten Sinfonia, directed by Stephen Layton, Hyperion, 2011, CD; 5. 179 Translation by E. Caswell, from Thesaurus Precus Latinarum (Treasury of Latin Prayers). Accessed online at
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minute, sublime oasis of beauty.181 The music does not dwell on the “hostile wars” of the text, but is instead a humble, radiant encounter with the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. The soundscape seems alive and alight with His presence. The 8-part choir, on sustained chords, creates a bed of rich, slow moving harmonies (diatonic with added notes for colour) below the soaring melodies of the sopranos. These “curlicues of melody,” sometimes echoing and imitating each other, trading phrases, other times “caroling together in thirds,” create the effect of quiet ecstasy.182 The main melodic motive, with a step or leap up to a lofty, held note, rounded out by a grace note tail, is suggestive of flying (see Figure 3.12). Heartbeats (and wings) flutter at the angelic closeness to the divine, present in so humble a form as the Eucharistic bread.
Figure 3.12. The opening of the piece. Solo sopranos trade melodic “curlicues” above the choir’s rich chords.
The overall dynamic remains hushed, reverent, and meditative. The climax comes on the word “gloria,” when the supporting choir, propelling forward, breaks through the texture and rises to a melodic high point, like a stream of light. The mezzo-forte that follows is the loudest dynamic in
181 The piece can be heard performed by the Trinity College Choir, Cambridge, directed by Stephen Layton, here:
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the piece. (See Figure 3.13.)
Figure 3.13. The choir rises to a climax on “gloria.”
After the splendour of this peak, everything settles back down again, gently and gradually, as the sopranos repeat the final line, “nobis donet in patria” (“…may give us in our native land”). The piece ends with this persistent hope and longing for the heavenly homeland.
All four of these transcendent musical moments in Mozart and Ešenvalds can be said to bear Aquinas’ markers of beauty — claritas, consonantia, and integritas. That they are caught up with a pondering of the person of Christ — as Merciful Redeemer, as Incarnate Word, as Risen One, and as Eucharistic Sacrifice, still abiding with us — is no coincidence and indeed significant, as it helps to highlight for us the ways in which the radiant beauty of Christ breaks upon us. First, it calls us into relationship. Second, it entails profound freedom and joy. Third, it requires us to open ourselves to its contemplation, making space within ourselves, like Mary, to receive and cherish it. The more we do so, the more we enter into it, and the more it is able to
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transform us.
Finally, the visceral reality of these examples of musical beauty should not be overlooked. They are not (only) beautiful in an abstract, intellectual sense, but they are beautiful to (and through) our sense of hearing; they come into being not (only) as a result of mental activity, but also by the strenuous and disciplined physical activity of living, breathing musicians. The given examples all happen to feature technically challenging music for the soprano voice, in which the demands of range, breath control, intonation, and agility are quite physically taxing. That all of this is overcome, and made to seem effortless, all in a moment, in itself leaves the listener in awe. The movement of musical lines and harmonies also imitates for us physical movement and creates a sense of dynamism. It is beautiful too in its particularity (these notes, these rhythms, these harmonies, these timbres, and no others), even while pointing to something universal. Our reaction to beauty, too, is often a physical one – a smile, a shiver, goosebumps, tears, or the sensation of a blow to the solar plexus – the “pain” of beauty as a flash of the fierce joy and fragility of being.
Conclusion: The Portal of Musical Beauty “Music was a thing of the soul — a rose lipped shell that murmured of the eternal sea — a strange bird singing the songs of another shore.” –J.G. Holland183
If we consider beauty as a transcendental, a reflection and revelation of God, it becomes clear that beauty in music can serve as a portal, indicator, path, or sensible manifestation putting us in touch with the eternal beauty of God.
In its attraction of our physical selves as a bearer of beauty into the material world through the senses, music draws its mediatory power from the mystery of the Incarnation. In its unique participation in the foundational principle of numerositas, music illuminates our intellects with the beauty of God’s Wisdom. Musical beauty, both sensory and intellectual, reminds us of, and points beyond itself to, Ultimate Beauty, its Source.
Two brief musical anecdotes will highlight the compelling and convicting nature of the call of
183 From “Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects. Art and Life.” Quotation in Hoyt & Roberts, compilers, Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (New York, London: Funk & Wagnalls company, 1922). Accessed online at Bartleby.com.
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the beautiful through music. Pope Benedict XVI recounts:
For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: “Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true”. The music had such an extraordinary force of reality that we realized, no longer by deduction, but by the impact on our hearts, that it could not have originated from nothingness, but could only have come to be through the power of the Truth that became real in the composer's inspiration.184 ********** [Violinist] Yehudi Menuhin recalled a concert in his career at which the physicist Albert Einstein was present. Menuhin recounted that after the concert Einstein came backstage to greet him, and complimented him with the words: “Thank you, Mr. Menuhin; you have once again proved to me that there is a God in heaven.”185
In these instances, the sheer beauty of music speaks to the heart, offering an insight into the fundamental meaning at the heart of being by serving to mediate truth and confirm conviction. While listening is a personal and subjective experience, the objective reality of the divine is reflected through the beauty of the music. The listeners intuitively link a deeply moving aesthetic experience with the depths of reality and the mystery of God. The beauty their senses and intellects perceive mediate a hidden objective aesthetic reality not otherwise available to sense or intellect.
This reality is the mystery of the God who is Beauty, upon whom all beauty depends, both creational and artistic, calling us ever onward. Christ, having crossed the abyss between God and Creation, roots all beauty in the splendour of His form.
184 Ratzinger, “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty,” paragraph 13, emphasis added. 185 Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics, 104, emphasis added.
Chapter Four: Music and Contemplation
“The glory of God is man and woman fully alive, but the glory of man and woman is the contemplation of God.” –St. Irenaeus of Lyons Introduction
One of the chief lessons music has to teach us is how to listen well. Deep, attentive, honest listening should be the hallmark of every stage of the musical process, from the composer’s initial, alert, stillness in capturing the music heard within, to the collaborative listening process between one performer and another that extends to the listening audience. American composer Roger Sessions reminds us that the Western, modern paradigm of composer, performer, and listener (three distinct, carefully divided roles) is a somewhat recent phenomenon: “In the beginning, no doubt, the three were one.”1 The role of listener, he argues, is actually a much more actively engaged one than we might think.
By the ‘listener,’ I do not mean the person who simply hears music—who is present when it is performed and who, in a general way, may either enjoy or dislike it, but who is in no sense a real participant in it. To listen implies rather a real participation, a real response, a real sharing in the work of the composer and of the performer[.]2 The true listening music requires of us is participatory, wholehearted, sacrificial even, as we surrender our time and attention along with our sensory, imaginative, and emotional faculties. It is a listening that gives as well as receives, gracefully. This schooling in deep listening may be helpful for growth not only in our human conversations and relationships, but arguably also in the life of prayer: the “conversation” and relationship with the divine. I propose that the deep listening engendered by music-making spills over into the spiritual life.
Taking a more theological approach, Don Saliers uses the phrase “active receptivity” to describe the listening disposition music demands of us, in order to receive the mystery it offers us.3
1 Roger Sessions, Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1950; 1971), 4. 2 Ibid., 7-8. Emphasis added. 3 Don E. Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 67.
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“Music is capable of bearing a mystery,” says Saliers. “It can create receptivity of the heart to attune to what God may be speaking”.4 Just as “reading” a religious icon involves seeing with the eyes of the heart, “[i]n like manner, music can be regarded as offering acoustical icons. . . . [T]he theological import of music requires a kind of active receptivity that is more akin to prayer, to contemplation, and to attending [to] the world with a sense of wonder and awe”.5
Tellingly, the phrase “active receptivity” is often used of Marian spirituality, a propos of Mary’s readiness to receive the Word implanted within her.6 As a Roman Catholic, the composer James MacMillan7 makes a connection between the active receptivity of Mary and the compositional process. MacMillan’s view of the creative process draws its model from the fiat of the Virgin Mary in Luke’s account of the Annunciation, and finds resonance in the act of contemplation. In Mary as in the Christian artist, God’s inspiration meets loving receptivity, and abundant creativity results. Not only Mary’s fecundity at bringing the Saviour to birth, but also the balance between her free will and openness to the power of the Holy Spirit provides a powerful and pertinent metaphor for the religious artist. In like manner, artistic creation (and we might also include musical performance, not just composition, in this concept) is in some sense a collaboration with the divine. Receiving inspiration from God does not negate our human powers of creativity, but in fact, enriches them, and allows them to come into their own, just as Jesus was both Son of God and son of Mary.8
Mary's paradigmatic receptivity is reflected also in contemplative prayer, which, like music, demands the sacrifice of our time and an openness to inner movements:
We come closest to Mary’s example of receptivity, longing and patient openness to God in our own religious contemplations. For these silent, introspective searches we are required to give up time. Prayer and contemplation are undeniably a kind of sacrifice . . . . Music also demands our time. . . . Being openly receptive to the transforming power of music is analogous to the patient receptivity to the divine that is necessary for religious contemplation.9
4 Saliers, Music and Theology, 70. 5 Ibid., 69. 6 This theme will be taken up more thoroughly in Chapter 5. 7 We have already encountered his music in Chapter 2. 8 Cf. James MacMillan, “God, Theology and Music.” New Blackfriars 81, 948 (February 2000): 16–26; 23; see also Chapter 5 below. 9 MacMillan, “God, Theology and Music,” 23-4, 25. Emphasis added.
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The musical connections that MacMillan has pointed out among listening, receptivity, and contemplation are ones we will delve into more deeply throughout the course of the present chapter.
The foregoing chapters have attempted to provide a foundation for thinking through what it would mean to take music seriously as a potentially sacramental medium. Bearing the themes we have traversed in mind — sacramentality, Incarnation, and beauty — this chapter moves into a consideration of the relationship between music and spiritual contemplation in the Christian context. Here, we will examine the intersection of music and contemplative prayer, seeking to engage the spiritual dimension of the experience of music by drawing parallels between listening to the interior Word in contemplative prayer and the act of listening to music. This is in an effort to establish music itself as a viable mode of contemplation and transformation, capable of renewing and strengthening the bond of love between the human soul and God.
I propose that the engagement with music (and not only in the context of worship) might have a significant impact on the spiritual life of the Christian by mirroring, to a certain extent, the experience of contemplative prayer, and so forming him or her to engage in that experience more fully. I have as my impetus a perceived similarity in the attitude required for both musical listening and contemplation (one, as I shall show, of humble, receptive, attentiveness). I am also inspired by the recognition of – a nearly universally attested phenomenon – the power of music to mediate or manifest certain “spiritual” or ineffable realities pertaining to issues of “ultimate concern.”10 (Such a power is only too evident in the almost ubiquitous use of music in religious rituals the world over and through the ages.) If contemplation can be understood primarily as “listening to the Word” (as I will discuss in what follows), then perhaps the practice of listening to music (and the composer/performer is by no means excluded from this listening) might provide us with a model, mirror, or possibly, training ground, for developing the contemplative faculty of listening (and responding) in prayer.
Moving a step further, if we recognize that the development of the contemplative faculty of the human person is possible through engagement in music, then we begin also to notice the possibility for music itself to become an occasion prompting contemplation, when listening to
10 Tillich's expression pertaining to the life of faith generally and the religious experience in particular.
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music actually becomes for the listener an encounter with God. This is a reinforcement of David Greene’s suggestion that, “There is a hearing of sacred music that is a relating to God”; a way of hearing sacred music, “such that the listening may be an event in the spiritual life.”11 We might consider this music’s highest function, when it, like all created goodness, points beyond itself to its Source.
In these cases, music becomes an instrument of contemplation such that it becomes the means of connection between the listener and God. Regarding the spiritual meanings of music, Greene describes music as a series of relationships. At one level, music consists of sounds relating to one another. At the next level, the listener relates to the music internally, such that his or her sense of self becomes shaped by it. Finally, it is possible that the music itself becomes the listener’s relation to God. This kind of sensitive, relationship-based listening is of a piece, I will argue, with authentic spiritual contemplation.
To begin, I will provide some perspective on what the Christian tradition means by “contemplation,” the highest form of prayer. Contemplation will be considered by means of various understandings, related primarily to an attentive, prayerful state of being (rather than doing) and a receptive silence in which God speaks. Following this, I will draw parallels between these understandings and the deep listening encouraged and engendered by music. I will show, furthermore, that the arts are intimately related to contemplation, in that they can initiate a profound contemplative moment and arise as a response to contact with the truth, beauty, and goodness of God experienced in contemplation. I will then briefly consider the Eastern Orthodox tradition of iconography as it regards contemplative prayer and draw a parallel with music, which has been called, in some contexts, a “sonic icon.” Finally, I will close with musical examples from J.S. Bach and Arvo Pärt to show how music can both train us in an openness to, and become an occasion for, contemplation.
Contemplative Prayer as Listening in Love “Let me hear your voice; for your voice is sweet…” (Song of Songs 2:14)
Prayer is the heart-to-heart colloquy with God that, we are exhorted, we must seek to be engaged
11 David B. Greene, The Spirituality of Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time: When Hearing Sacred Music is Relating to God (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012), 1.
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in everywhere and at all times.12 In truth, since “we do not know how to pray as we ought,” it is the Holy Spirit who comes to intercede “with sighs too deep for words” to enable and enliven our prayer.13 Again, as in all movements of the spiritual life, we see that with prayer, it is God who takes the initiative: “You did not choose me but I chose you.”14
The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of three main expressions of the life of prayer: vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplative prayer. All are ways of keeping vigilant, waiting upon God, and dwelling in God’s presence. Above all, these expressions share in common one basic trait: “composure of heart.”15
While vocal prayer involves (mental or verbal) words, and meditation involves an active “quest” for deeper understanding of Christian truths, contemplation involves interior gazing/listening, silence, union, and love. A well-known definition aptly describes contemplative prayer as “a long, loving look at the Real.”16 The “simplest expression of the mystery of prayer,”17 it is a “gaze of faith fixed on Jesus, an attentiveness to the Word of God, a silent love”.18 This highest and most intimate form of prayer is, in St. Teresa of Avila’s words, “a close sharing between friends,”19 in which God and the soul simply behold one another in love and stillness. The Catechism further describes contemplation in terms of the attentive, receptive listening, and childlike, unconditional acceptance which befits the authentic disciple, in imitation of both the Virgin Mary and of Christ: “Contemplative prayer is hearing the Word of God. . . . It participates in the ‘Yes’ of the Son become servant20 and the Fiat of God's lowly handmaid”.21 Finally, in the
12 “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, NRSV). “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Luke 18:1, NRSV). 13 Romans 8:26, NRSV. 14 John 15:16, NRSV. 15 CCC 2699. Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II (Vatican City: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1997. Accessed online at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM.) 16 Attributed to Walter Burghardt, SJ; source unknown. 17 CCC 2713. 18 CCC 2724. 19 Quoted in CCC 2709. St. Teresa of Jesus, The Book of Her Life. 8,5 in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, tr. K. Kavanaugh, OCD, and O. Rodriguez, OCD (Washington DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1980),II,136. 20 Christ's obedience: “Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said: 'Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; with burnt offerings and sin offerings you were not pleased. Then I said, “Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, my God.” ’ ” (Hebrews 10: 5-7, NIV) 21 CCC 2716.
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silence of contemplative prayer, we share, through the Spirit of adoption, in the very prayer of Jesus, and receive the Word of the Father interiorly. The silence points us to the world beyond as a “symbol of the world to come.”22 In contemplative prayer, one moves beyond active striving, petitions, words, and mental images, simply to “be with” God. It is an answer, in love, to Jesus’s request that the disciples watch with Him one hour.23
In the Carmelite tradition, St. Teresa of Avila gives us the evocative image of the heart as a garden where the Lord comes to us in the moment of prayer. In order for the garden to flourish, it must be watered. St. Teresa describes four means of watering the interior garden, according to a beginner’s progress in prayer:
Either the water must be drawn from a well, which is very laborious; or by a water-wheel and buckets, worked by a windlass – I have sometimes drawn it in this way, which is less laborious than the other, and brings us more water – or from a stream or spring, which waters the ground much better . . .; or by heavy rain, when the Lord waters it Himself without any labour of ours; and this is an incomparably better method than all the rest.24
In this fourth, blissful, unitive stage, it is God who entirely takes over the labour of prayer in providing abundant water for the garden. The soul is totally occupied with God in stillness and wishes to remain so, in loving freedom. This is the “prayer of quiet,” or “infused contemplation,” which no amount of striving can procure. It is always a gift of God, yet it presupposes a disposition of humble willingness and vigilance. This beautiful image recalls Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, where He takes the initiative by coming to her to ask for a drink of water, and then reveals that He is able to provide living water “gushing up to eternal life.”25
While von Balthasar sees prayer as a dialogue, with some degree of reciprocity, he affirms that it is God who takes the initiative. Because God speaks first, says Balthasar, all contemplation is first and foremost a listening to the Word.26 That the possibility of contemplation – intimate
22 CCC 2717. (Cf. St. Isaac of Nineveh, Tract. myst. 66.) 23 Matthew 26:40. CCC 2719 makes reference to this. 24 Saint Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, translated by J.M. Cohen (1957) (London; New York; Markham; Auckland: Penguin Books Ltd., 1987), Chapter 11; 78. 25 John 4:14 (cf. 1-30). 26 Hans Urs von Balthasar. Prayer, translated by Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986 [1955]), 15.
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intercourse with the divine, in which we hear God’s self-communication – should be open to us at all is God’s doing, “a miracle of the Father’s utterly free love”.27 God's election of us in Christ before all eternity allows for this remarkable possibility. Thus Christ both grants us the possibility of hearing the Word – the self-expression of the Father – and as the Word, is that very same self-expression. We are able to hear the Word since the Word is within us; and we are in the Word. Our relationship to the Word in prayer is always both “an entering-in to the innermost ‘I’, and the turning-outward of this I to the highest ‘Thou’”.28 We are “enveloped, before all time” in God's love, chosen and pleasing to the Father by being in the Son.29
While His life, death and resurrection are fixed historical realities, the person of Christ, “yesterday, today, forever,”30 continues to offer a boundless depth of revelation. The Word, all- embracing, spoken once for all time, still resounds today with “the same vitality and freshness as ever; it is just as near to us as it always was”.31 It (or He) contains all God wishes to express to us, sufficient forever, and new every moment, infinitely enticing, and always extending a new call and challenge to the hearer.32 It demands a response from the one who hears (for the spiritual life is a dialogue, after all), a response that takes the form of a life lived in sincere charity and love for the world.
Balthasar uses a musical image to describe the way in which the contemplative experiences God's word as ever new:
[A]t each instance of contemplation, the love of God which each individual experiences as unique plays an utterly fresh, original and inimitable melody upon the instrument of Christ’s life. The instrument has a limited number of keys, just as the words of holy scripture are limited. But there is an unlimited number of possible variations on the one theme, which is the self-sacrifice of divine love and our initiation into the depths
27 Balthasar, Prayer, 38, 39. 28 Ibid., 23. 29 Ibid., 62; cf. 58. 30 Hebrews 13:8. 31 Balthasar, Prayer, 16. 32 “No seraph, no saint in all eternity could ‘get used’ to it; in fact, the longer one gazes into this mystery, the more one longs to go on gazing, glimpsing the fulfillment of that to which our entire creaturely nature aspires. The creature, seeing and hearing God, experiences the highest bliss of self-fulfillment, but it is fulfilled by something infinitely greater than itself, and its fulfillment and bliss are commensurately great” (Balthasar, Prayer, 25). Balthasar associates beholding with the life to come and hearing with the present, yet: “All the same, this distinction is only partially valid. Even in eternity itself God will not cease, in the freest self-giving, to be our fulfillment; so that even when we enjoy the vision of God we shall always be hanging on his every word, we shall always be listening to him” (ibid., 25-6).
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of divine meaning.33
This musical metaphor, of the innumerable possible melodies played by the love of God upon Christ’s life, variations on the one all-encompassing theme, merges well with Balthasar's central notion of contemplation as hearing. Hearing is primary to the way we relate to God and central to our human potential. The contemplative “is simply an open ear to the ever-new word of God”.34 We are created to be hearers of the word, and it is in hearing and responding that we come into our own as human beings.35 Learning how to listen “is the original wellspring of all Christian life and prayer”.36 “Since God himself has created us in such a way that we must hear the word of God if we are to be ourselves, he has also endowed us with the ability to hear it. . . . This ability to hear the word goes as deep in us as being itself; the Father created us as spiritual creatures, and so we are 'hearers of the word'”.37 This ability to hear, implanted in us by the Creator, is faith. This draws the mind, of course, to Romans 10:17 (“for faith comes by hearing”).
To listen involves the body, soul, and mind, in a quieting, a surrender, a vulnerability, and an opening up to the other. “The ‘flesh’ of the Word touches our flesh, and in him God becomes our neighbor. That is why, in prayer, we need to have all our senses awake,” says Balthasar.38 While for St. Teresa, in the highest states of prayer, the senses along with the other human faculties cease to function, Balthasar suggests instead a kind of radical awakening and focusing of all of the senses, united in being fixed on the “one thing” that is needful.39 The whole person, not just the soul, prays, just as it is the whole person who goes out, after having prayed, to serve and to love.40
Contemplation requires a humble waiting upon God and readiness to respond, in which the faculties are, paradoxically, diminished only to be activated by God. Sarah Coakley recognizes “the ‘paradox of power and vulnerability’ . . . uniquely focused in this act of silent waiting on
33 Balthasar, Prayer, 204. 34 Ibid.,83. 35 Ibid., 22. 36 Ibid., 31. 37 Ibid., 33. 38 Ibid., 165. 39 “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-2) 40 Balthasar, Prayer, 229; 243.
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the divine in prayer”.41 Because contemplative prayer consists of “a regular and willed practice of ceding and responding to the divine,” she says, the contemplative both yields and is empowered.42 Coakley links this to the kenosis of Christ:
[T]his practice is profoundly transformative, ‘empowering’ in a mysterious ‘Christic’ sense; for it is a feature of the special ‘self- effacement’ of this gentle space-making – this yielding to divine power which is no worldly power – that it marks one's willed engagement in the pattern of cross and resurrection, one's deeper rooting and grafting into the ‘body of Christ.’ . . . this special 'self-emptying' is not a negation of self, but the place of the self's transformation and expansion into God.43
For Karl Rahner, likewise, prayer is a sacrificial act of surrender in utter, loving dependence, an opening of the heart which results in a silent communing with God: “This colloquy of the heart with God cannot be expressed in words, because it is a silent reaching out towards God with reverential fear and sublime trust. It is a complete silent oblation of self, and an entire surrender to God”.44
Balthasar also describes contemplation in terms of a lover relating to the Beloved. In this dynamic, the inner senses and imagination call the image of the Beloved forth, each aspect is lovingly dwelt upon, and, in the Beloved's presence, the lover is wakeful and attentive to everything the Beloved says.45 There are two ways of delighting in the Beloved, linked to existential and essential contemplation: the first is to delight over the very fact that the Beloved exists, and second, to delight over the many particular qualities of the Beloved.
As James MacMillan did, Balthasar finds his model in Mary: “The hearer par excellence is the virgin, who becomes pregnant with the Word and bears it as her Son and the Father’s”.46 In Mary's generous response to God's invitation, she takes the Word into her very being. “In the Spirit [Mary] utters that Yes of hers which is the origin of all Christian contemplation, by which
41 Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford, UK ; Malden, MA : Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 34. Sarah Coakley is concerned with issues of power in theological feminism, in particular how to redeem the notion of suffering and sacrifice – “losing one’s life in order to save it” – in a way that transcends issues of gender, and does away with the legitimization of the victimization of women. She uses the model of contemplative prayer as a way forward. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 35, 36. 44 Karl, Rahner, On Prayer (New York, N.Y.: Paulist Press, 1968), 15. 45 Balthasar, Prayer, 129-131. 46 Ibid., 29.
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she becomes pregnant with the Word and keeps ‘all these things, pondering them in her heart’ (Lk 2:19, 51)”.47
Like Mary's listening, the listening of the contemplative is never passive or dispassionate. Listening entails an active dimension, a receptivity and loving attentiveness, and a response, like Mary's fiat; a commitment carried out in the reality of daily life, with drastic implications and repercussions for that reality. For this reason, contemplation is not an escape from the world, but a place where eternity reaches into time:
When [the contemplative] emerges from prayer, [it] is not as one blinded by yonder glory, unable to come to grips with the world here below, and yearning to retire to contemplation's blissful meadows . . . [but rather] as someone sent, who has received in contemplation (without being aware of it) all the equipment [needed for the] Christian mission: the authority, the abilities and the taste for it.48
The attention paid to the “here-and-now” of contemplation is important to emphasize, since its otherworldly aspects are self-evident. With it comes the acknowledgement and affirmation of the senses, which even when conceived of as “spiritualized,” are nevertheless rooted to a bodily experience because of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body:
As believers privileged to share in the Lord's resurrection, our senses acquire something of the pneumatic quality of the Lord's glorified senses even prior to our own resurrection, so that, in him and together with him, we can grasp the Father and the Spirit and the entire world beyond.49
In this sense, contemplation is equated in a real way with the “seeing, hearing, and touching” of the Word in the First Letter of John. In a similar way, Balthasar sees contemplation straddling heaven and earth. This tension is ultimately a Christological one:
Christian existence calls for two things at once: we must maintain the distinction between heaven and earth which is grounded in creation and will not be overcome until the eschaton; and we must affirm the fact that this distinction has been superseded in principle (though not yet made manifest) by the ascension to heaven of the Man Christ, who has taken our humanity to heaven with him, authentically, although hiddenly. This irreducible tension is part of our whole Christian life, and thus it belongs
47 Balthasar, Prayer, 71. 48 Ibid., 121-2. 49 Ibid., 270.
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particularly to Christian contemplation.50
Part and parcel of this is Balthasar's insistence on the firmly historical character of revelation, which can never be said to exist in a vacuum, since it is always received by historically situated and time-based human beings.51 Contemplation is therefore always an embodied and fully human endeavour, which rather than remove us from our situation, provides the means for us to engage more wholeheartedly with it.
For Thomas Merton52, contemplation is a kind of summit of the prayer life. It is more than “thoughtfulness or a taste for reflection” or “prayerfulness, or a tendency to find peace and satisfaction in liturgical rites”; instead, it cuts to the heart of who the human being is before God, and the coming to an awareness of that identity.53 It has to do with the Real itself. Contemplation is spiritual wonder, gratitude, for existence itself. It is experiential; looking and being looked at; touching and being touched by God. Essentially, it is an awakening of the true, hidden self united to God in Christ, an awakening carried out not by the contemplative but by God, who (again) takes the initiative; a “vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being”.54 Contemplative prayer is prayer oriented towards God dwelling within, at the core of one's being, in whom the deep, transcendent self is rooted. This orientation is one of emptying and surrender, motivated, buoyed up, and terminating in love.55
Merton links contemplation with the arts, theology, and philosophy, but declares that it goes beyond them all as the end for which they are grasping: “But contemplation is beyond aesthetic intuition, beyond art, beyond poetry. Indeed it is also beyond philosophy, beyond speculative theology” as the fulfillment of all of these.56
As with Balthasar, Merton understands contemplation not as a removal from the concerns of the world, but as something that must lead one out into active and practical love of humanity.57 Nor is it an escape from doubt, conflict, or anguish, because it leads to questioning, refining, a greater
50 Balthasar, Prayer, 284, cf. 291. 51 Ibid., 37. 52Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 2007). 53 Ibid., 9. 54 Ibid., 3. 55 John J. Higgins, Merton’s Theology of Prayer (Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1971), 50; 66. 56 Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 2. 57 Merton himself, as a contemplative monk, was deeply engaged in the political and religious concerns of his day.
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vulnerability in loving and a deeper engagement with faith and the world.
The ramifications of contemplative prayer are bound up, then, with a justice-oriented faith that seeks to carry out the will of the One who has been encountered so profoundly. Yet all meaningful action flows from contemplation and is fed by it. In a world that prizes busyness, achievement, and doing over being, the primacy of contemplation becomes a counter-cultural challenge that requires us to rethink the meaning of our priorities and the value we set on work. Contemplation allows and requires us to live a life informed by the deeper realities beneath the surface of the everyday, living mindfully in the presence of God and maintaining the inner stillness at the centre of our being, where God dwells.
The philosopher Josef Pieper58 takes up Aristotle’s dictum “We work so we can have leisure” to highlight the notion of leisure as activity meaningful in itself, not a mere rest from work but that which gives meaning to the whole of life. He links interiorly meaningful leisure with contemplation and those activities that allow a perception of divine mysteries:
Whenever in reflective and receptive contemplation we touch, even remotely, the core of all things, the hidden, ultimate reason of the living universe, the divine foundation of all that is, the purest form of all archetypes . . . whenever and wherever we thus behold the very essence of reality – there is an activity that is meaningful in itself taking place.59
What this means is that contemplation is by no means tangential to human life, but allows for an opening of perception towards which our daily activities are directed, and through which we encounter “the archetypal essences of all things.”
Josef Pieper connects this perception in contemplation with religious meditation, philosophical reflection, the pondering of events or beautiful things, and explicitly with art in a very concrete way, both the making of art, and given the right conditions, its enjoyment by the observer or listener.60 Contemplation through art entails “the stepping-out into the open under an endless sky, not only for the creative artist . . . but for the beholder as well, even the most humble. Such liberation, such foreshadowing of the ultimate and perfect fulfillment, is necessary” for the
58 Josef Pieper, Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation. Translated by Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990). 59 Ibid., 23. 60 Ibid., 24.
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human being.61
The arts are intricately bound up with contemplation. According to Pieper, the beginning of all art is contemplation.62 “[M]usic, the fine arts, poetry— anything that festively raises up human existence and thereby constitutes its true riches—all derive their life from a hidden root, and this root is a contemplation which is turned toward God and the world so as to affirm them”.63 The artist must first behold (reality, beauty) through contemplation, and retain what has been perceived in the moment of beholding.64 The artist is then compelled to create, seeking to present those intuitions received in contemplation through art, just as the contemplative must engage with the world and seek to apply or communicate the truths experienced in contemplation.
As Balthasar and Merton also stress, Pieper declares that that which is perceived or received in contemplation (the impetus for all art) is free gift: “One of the fundamental human experiences is the realization that the truly great and uplifting things in life come about perhaps not without our own efforts but nevertheless not through those efforts”.65 Still, our cooperation, the right disposition, is required, as is the ability to perceive as we ought: “[The human being]’s ability to see is in decline. . . . We mean the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is”.66 The restoration of the “inner eyes” can be achieved by the process of artistic creation, which first of all requires observation – a kind of making space and paying attention comparable to listening.
Anglo-Catholic writer and mysticism scholar Evelyn Underhill in her writings also makes an overt connection between the mystic (whom we might also understand as “the contemplative”) and the creative artist, seeing art as a manifestation of spiritual Beauty and the artist as a mystic/mediator with unique access to beauty. Underhill defines mysticism itself as an art – the “art of Union with Reality”.67 As she sees it, the true artist shares with the true mystic the
61 Pieper, Only the Lover Sings, 27. 62 Evelyn Underhill makes a similar claim in her essay, “The Mystic as Creative Artist,” (in The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays, New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1960) that both mystic (i.e., contemplative) and artist are privileged with insight into Reality and tasked with translating that insight into forms beneficial for his or her fellows. 63 Pieper, Only the Lover Sings, 11. 64 Ibid., 73ff. 65 Ibid., 25. 66 Ibid., 31. 67 Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1915), 3.
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experience of Illumination:
We have seen that all real artists, as well as all pure mystics, are sharers to some degree in the Illuminated Life. They have drunk, with Blake, from that cup of intellectual vision which is the chalice of the Spirit of Life: know something of its divine inebriation whenever Beauty inspires them to create. Some have only sipped it. Some . . . have drunk deep. . . . But to all who have seen Beauty face to face, the Grail has been administered; and through that sacramental communion they are made participants in the mystery of the world.68
Underhill imagines a veil hanging between nature, or our own consciousness, and ourselves, which is dense and opaque for most, but almost transparent for the artist and mystic.69 Granted a clearer vision of “a more vivid and more beautiful world than other men” in seeing Beauty face to face, artists are driven to express the truths they have apprehended using the media of their craft.70 The greatest creations of artists are translations “of something they have known, in a moment of ecstatic union with the ‘great life of the All.’”71 The artist:
is no more and no less than a contemplative who has learned to express himself, and who tells his love in colour, speech, or sound: the mystic, upon one side of his nature, is an artist of a special and exalted kind, who tries to express something of the revelation he has received, mediates between Reality and the race.72
Having experienced illumination, artists are drawn to share their vision with others, and become mediators of beauty. Great works of art bear the assurance “that their creators have enjoyed direct communion, not with some vague world of fancy, but with a visible natural order which you have never known.”73 The power of art, Underhill says, lies in its evocativeness, by description and by suggestion, of that limitless world on the other side of the veil.74 In a mysterious way, that beauty which is beyond comprehension breaks in upon this world through works of art, mediated through artists. Artists experience a sense of restlessness, a “feeling of
68 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. (London: Metheun & Co. Ltd, 1911. Reprint of the 12th edition, E.P. Dutton and Company, 1930. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2002), 236-7. 69 Evelyn Underhill, “The Mystic as Creative Artist,” (64-85) in The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1960; reprinted from 1920), 66. 70 Underhill, Practical Mysticism, 154. 71 Underhill, Mysticism, 366. 72 Underhill, Practical Mysticism, 27. 73 Ibid., 20-1. 74 Underhill, “Mystic as Creative Artist,” 69.
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dissatisfaction with the world” as it is, because they have known “another, lovelier world, tinted with unimaginable wonders, alive with ultimate music.”75 The impulse to create is itself both an imprint of the Divine Creator, and the final stage of fruitfulness after the three-stage itinerary of purgation-illumination-union on the mystic way.
This self-giving, through the creation of art, is, in the final analysis, “the function of the mystic consciousness in respect of the human race” – rather than a selfish, individualistic ecstasy, “[i]t receives in order that it may give.”76 If the artist has mystical tendencies, so too should the mystic employ art to enlighten others:
[The mystic] must turn back to pass on the revelation he has received: must mediate between the transcendent and his fellow-men. He is, in fact, called to be a creative artist of the highest kind; and only when he is such an artist, does he fulfill his duty to the race. . . . He not only ascends, but descends the ladder of contemplation; having heard ‘the uninterrupted music of the inner life,’ he tries to weave it into melodies that other men can understand.77
Musical Resonances of Contemplation
What connections to music can we make with what has been claimed above about contemplation? We have already hinted at a number of these. Let us now consider three main aspects: listening as loving receptivity, the discovery of profound meaning, and mediations of spirit and matter.
1. Listening as loving receptivity:
Drawing from the Catechism, and fully fleshed out in Balthasar, we can state that the best analogy for contemplative prayer is one of listening. The meaning of this corresponds perfectly to an understanding of Christ, in whom the Father acts in self-revelation, as the Word. This is not an unintelligible, heavenly speech which we can never hope to grasp, but a word that is addressed to humankind, and addressed to us most profoundly in such a way as to resonate in the existential depths of our being and fulfill us utterly. In contemplation we place ourselves before God in an attitude of patient attentiveness and loving receptivity to the Word, declaring, “Speak,
75 Underhill, Practical Mysticism, 13, 17-18. 76 Underhill, “Mystic as Creative Artist,” 65. 77 Ibid., 65-66.
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Lord, your servant is listening” (1 Samuel 3:10). It is a space-making, a clearing of the way, a welcoming, in the manner of Mary’s reception of the Word as her own Son.
As for sight, now we see but “in a mirror, dimly;”78 the beatific vision is reserved for the time when all is fully made manifest. The contemplation we engage in in the here-and-now is hearing that Word, and being compelled, transformed, and commissioned by that Word in the profound silence of our being.
That an engagement with music engenders a deep sense of listening almost goes without saying. In order to perceive music, we must quiet ourselves to make space for it and attend to it. This open, silent waiting and yielding parallels the contemplative’s attitude. Music demands a sacrifice of our time (for music demands just as much of our time as it demands!), patience as we ride the wave of anticipation, and a humility in placing hearing above being heard. Just as, in contemplation, a response is demanded in the form of discipleship and obedience, music invites a response in the hearer, prompting an emotional, intellectual, visceral, or spiritual reaction, or communicating to us some idea or truth in musical form to which we must react concretely.
The same is true, only to a greater extent, for the musician. A cellist playing in a string quartet must make space for the first violin line, and receive and attend to it gracefully, responding in fitting manner. Even playing a solo Bach suite, she must listen to the note sounding in the present while the note that has just sounded and the note that is yet to sound ring in her ears.
2. Mediation of spirit and matter:
The encounter with God in contemplation should not be a flight from the body or an escape from the world. While remaining rooted to the world, tied by love to creation and committed to one’s brothers and sisters, the contemplative, united to Jesus, invites the Spirit into matter, eternity into time, and heaven to earth—and vice-versa. For Balthasar, the senses, even if spiritualized, are part of the dynamic, especially bearing in mind 1 John 1: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (NIV). Our physical hearing will be incorporated into the spiritual hearing of God’s Word since the Risen and Ascended Christ is still fully human. We exist now in a tension which contemplation lifts up and makes more acute,
78 1 Corinthians 13:12.
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as earthly beings destined for heaven.
Music has been classically understood as a mediator between body and spirit, or heaven and earth, because of the mysterious nature lent to it by its immateriality. Unlike a painting or sculpture, a piece of music only really exists in the time it takes to be performed. Yet lovers of music know that it also continues to exist in a profound way after the last note has been sounded. While music symbolizes (and gives a value to) the transient nature of human life, it also (paradoxically) points to the everlasting nature of the life transformed, renewed and given in Christ. Music’s impact on our bodies and its time-based nature are essential to the way we relate to it. Yet we also sense in it the mysteries of a reality beyond both matter and time, into which our present human nature is drawn.
3. The discovery of profound meaning:
Josef Pieper understands contemplation as an activity singularly meaningful in itself, in which something absolutely fundamental is perceived that has tremendous implications for the whole of life. That something he calls "the very essence of reality" and the "divine fountain of all that is".79 For Merton, it is the experience of wonder at existence itself and, specifically an awareness of God's existence at the core of our being and of the reality of our true existence as united to God in Christ. Touching upon the heart of reality in this way compels the creative artist to translate the experience into works of art; it compels the Christian to renew his commitment to the gospel life in order to do justice to the true “self” he now knows himself to be.
The experience of listening to a piece of music can be so profound and all-embracing, that it seems to flood the whole of our being and to give voice to all that we would wish to be, or hope to express. It is the sheer beauty, or overwhelming power, or heartrending purity, or emotional authenticity of the music – and not necessarily a particular constituent part but the music as a whole – that awakens a profound yearning within us. Our very identity becomes caught up with the music; in T.S. Eliot’s words: “You are the music while the music lasts.”80 Our pains, hopes, joys, fears, relationships, desires, seem to be caught up and expressed musically. Again, this can happen in heightened ways for a performer. This mysterious and existential experience that
79 Pieper, Only the Lover Sings, 23. 80 From Four Quartets (“The Dry Salvages,” 1941).
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music can afford is immensely compelling. While it cannot be put into words, one feels as though one must try to live one’s life in a way that accords with it and with the private insights received through it.
Amidst his consideration of contemplation and the arts, Pieper treats music in particular. What is it, he asks, that we perceive in music? It is more than sounds alone, yet not an object per se. Even in texted music, “provided we listen in the proper manner, we invariably perceive an additional, most intimate, meaning that would be absent from the words alone. This ‘most intimate’ meaning is not expressed by the words alone, whether written or spoken!”81 This non-discursive dimension of meaning opened up to us in music grants it a capability to express realities beyond speech to grasp, as in the “jubilation” of Augustine,82 an encounter with God that must dissolve into wordless praise, a cry of joy surpassing speech.
Underlining, once again, the importance of attentive listening, Pieper establishes the connection between music and silence: “music is alone in creating a particular kind of silence, though by no means soundlessly. . . . It makes a listening silence possible, but a silence that listens to more than simply sound and melody”.83 This entails a stripping down of words and thoughts, beyond which a realm of unmediated truth opens up. “Music opens a path into the realm of silence. Music reveals the human soul in stark ‘nakedness’”.84
Finally, Pieper claims that music has held the philosopher’s continued interest “because it is by its nature so close to the fundamentals of human existence”.85 By this he seems to mean a dynamic movement through time. Summarizing music in the Western philosophical tradition, Pieper says: “music articulates the inner dynamism of man’s existential self, which is music’s ‘prime matter’ (so to speak), and both share a particular characteristic – both move in time”.86 Furthermore, music communicates “the immediacy of man’s basic existential dynamism in an immediate way,” touching and challenging the listener on a profound existential level.87 Music,
81 Pieper, Only the Lover Sings, 41. 82 Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 1-32, “Exposition 2 of Psalm 32” (translated by Maria Boulding, O.S.B.; New York: New City Press, 2000), 400-1. 83 Pieper, Only the Lover Sings, 55. 84 Ibid., 44. 85 Ibid., 39. 86 Ibid., 45. 87 Pieper, Only the Lover Sings, 47.
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then, can mirror for us the complexities of what it means to be alive, to be human, to be in relation to God.
Music as Sonic Icon
Let us turn to another image to understand music’s role in prompting contemplative prayer. The glorious tradition of iconography, which is so central to the theology and worship of the Orthodox Church,88 is able to provide us with an analogy for the way in which music of a certain kind can potentially become a stepping stone to the divine. Understanding the basic concept of the icon, even in broad strokes, allows us to witness one powerful way in which art, taken up and enlivened by the Spirit, plays a major role in the spiritual process of contemplation. First, we must understand the role of the icon as it relates to the Orthodox notion of moving towards union with God, known as theosis.
Deification, or theosis, is the pinnacle of the spiritual trajectory in Orthodox spirituality. In Christ, our human nature has been taken up into the divine nature. Paul Eudokimov explains the radical transfiguration of the Adamic image that has taken place in Christ: “We see that the mystery of salvation goes far beyond a simple reestablishment of what Adam was before the Fall, the Adamic image. Christ made that image a reality, brought it to fullness, for having purified it, he opened it up to participation in divine beauty.”89 Christ’s Transfiguration itself is an image of this. The process by which the divine image becomes ever more fully and gloriously realized takes place through the contemplation of Christ, the image or “icon” God has given us of Godself. “For the Christian East, being deified is to contemplate the uncreated Light and to allow it to penetrate us.”90 The light and beauty of God’s glory shines through Christ. In an analogous way, icons of the Trinity, Christ, and the Saints impart the light and beauty of God’s glory to the beholder by becoming a place of mediation. Far from serving a mere didactic or utilitarian function, in a mysterious way the images of Orthodox iconography mediate the presence of the One they represent. This is so through the “sacramental”91 power of the symbol,
88 “In the icon, the church defended the very foundation of the Christian faith.” Paul Eudokimov, The Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty (Trans. S. Bingham. Redondo Beach, CA: Oakwood, 1990), 272. 89 Ibid., 270. 90 Ibid., 271. 91 “In a nutshell, the icon is a sacrament for the Christian East; more precisely, it is the vehicle of a personal presence. . . . That is why the intercession of a priest and the blessing ritual are necessary to inaugurate an icon into its liturgical function and thereby into its theophanic ministry. An image which has been verified for dogmatic correctness by a priest, which conforms to the Holy Tradition, and which attains a sufficient level of artistic
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which, unlike a sign or allegory, participates in that to which it points. “Symbolic knowledge is always indirect. It appeals to the contemplative faculty of the mind, to the real imagination, both evocative and invocative. In this way, symbolic knowledge decodes the meaning and message of the symbol and grasps its epiphanic character, a character which shows forth a figured, symbolized but very real presence of the transcendent.”92 The icon exists not for itself, but to radiate the divine presence, and to become a privileged place of mediation through symbolic participation. “The icon gets all its theophanic value from its participation in the Wholly Other; the icon is the mirror of the Wholly Other.”93 The icon “offers itself as the meeting place where divine Beauty comes down to meet us.”94 The light revealed by and through the icon is “a ray of the Eighth Day, a witness of inaugurated eschatology”95 – a light breaking upon us from on high.
Witnessing the beautiful, well-defined, and theologically rich tradition of Orthodox iconography, I would like to suggest, can remind the wider Christian Church of the potential of works of art to serve as symbolic mediators of divine goodness, beauty, and truth. Allowing ourselves to be inspired by the iconographic tradition, we can turn to the sacred arts with a contemplative eye, ear, and heart, confident that the Holy Spirit can work through these imaginative media in a revelatory way. The prayerful reading of Scripture known as lectio divina assumes this kind of contemplative, listening openness. Visual and musical expressions,96 I believe, might also offer opportunities for meditative and contemplative prayer. Attentive, prayerful “reading” of visual art (“visio divina”) and of music (“audio divina”) can become enlivening spiritual practices in their own right. More to the point, to the extent that it lets the glory and beauty of God shine through to touch and transform us, music also can become a kind of “icon,” becoming for our
expression becomes a ‘miraculous icon’ by the divine response to the epiclesis in the rite. ‘Miraculous’ here means exactly that the icon is charged with a presence. The icon is a sure witness of this presence and the ‘channel of grace and sanctifying virtue. [St. John of Damascus, On the Divine Images, I, I, 16]. The Seventh Ecumenical Council stated it very explicity: ‘Whether it be by the contemplation of the Scriptures or by the representation of the icon . . . we remember all the prototypes and we are introduced into their presence’ [Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio XIII, 482]. The Council of 860 affirmed the same thing: ‘What the gospel says to us in words, the icon announces to us in colors and makes it present to us’ [Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio XVI, 400].” Eudokimov, The Art of the Icon, 236. 92 Ibid., 275. 93 Ibid., 237. 94 Ibid., 238. 95 Ibid., 268. Cf. Anita Strezova, “Function of Religious Images in Byzantine Iconophile Apologia,” International Journal of Orthodox Theology 4:3 (2013), 60-84. 96 The caveat of course is that Scripture, as the divinely inspired Word, strictly speaking cannot be said to be equivalent to other “works of art.”
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ears (and via the ear, the heart), what the icon is for the eye.97
While an application of the visual theology of the icon, and the liturgical system it presupposes, cannot simply be applied to music “one-to-one,” I believe one can learn much in general about artful prayer (and prayerful art) from the contemplative attitude one takes in the presence of a religious icon. The prayerful approach to art and music can make prayer an art in itself.
Bearing in mind the ways in which a musical experience can model, prepare us for, and even provide an impetus for, true contemplation, we now lift up two pieces, by J.S. Bach and Arvo Pärt. These diverse examples testify to what we might call music’s consonance with contemplation: that is, its ability to proffer quiet “inner rooms” for us to inhabit with prayerful humility and openness.
Musical Recap: Silent Pondering in the Heart in Bach and Pärt
Bach, “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” in the St. Matthew Passion, BWV 24498 It has been remarked of Johann Sebastian Bach: “the focus of his emotional life was undoubtedly in religion, and in the service of religion through music.”99 Any familiarity with his vast musical output alone, rich in sacred and theologically-engaged works (Masses, Mass movements, Magnificats, cantatas, Passions, Oratorios, chorales, organ works), seems to lead to this conclusion. It is natural for us to conceive of the composer—who would mark his scores with “Juva Jesu” (Help me, Jesus) and “Solo Deo Gloria” (To God alone be the glory), whose Bible was well-marked and evidently well-read, and who possessed a vast collection of the writings of German theologians in his library— as one who dedicated his life and work to the “service of religion through music,” namely the Lutheran faith. Though it is impossible to look into the innermost workings of his heart and assess the composer’s faith, we can say with confidence that
97 It should come as no surprise that certain composers, inspired by Orthodox tradition, have sought to reflect the world of the icon through musical means. The English composer John Tavener (1944-2013), for example, deeply inspired by Orthodox spirituality, music, and liturgy, composed a number of pieces he called “Ikons.” Arvo Pärt’s music (discussed below) is also spoken of in these terms. Interestingly, both of these composers converted to Eastern Orthodoxy from Protestant Christianity. 98 A recording can be with soprano Dorothee Mields, the Cologne Philharmonie, and Collegium Vocale, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe can be found here:
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Bach had an abiding interest in, and knowledge of, Lutheran theology,100 and an understanding of himself and his work at the service of the Church.
According to Johann Kuhnau, founder of the eighteenth-century passion tradition, the composer of church music had to possess two special qualities: “first, that he be able to stir the affections, and second, that he be no stranger to hermeneutics (the art of scriptural exegesis), and understand both the correct sensus and scopus of the words.”101 That Bach possessed these musico- theological abilities required of him as Cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig is beyond question. His music exhibits a genius for compositional inventiveness and creativity, a deep sensitivity to the needs of the worship life of the church, together with a heartfelt eloquence on matters of faith and the ability to inspire devotion through emotional engagement.
Bach’s monumental work, the St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), provides ample opportunity to witness his genius for creating musico-theological spaces of contemplation and devotion. Here, Bach’s music serves not only to dramatize the Passion story, but to interpret its theological meaning for Christians, in a way which invites personal devotional engagement. The interplay of musical forms (chorales, choruses, ariosi, arias) and texts (scriptural and devotional) involve the listener implicitly in the telling of the Passion story, making the believer an integral part of the drama.102
The St. Matthew Passion, as Robin Leaver points out, was written for the purposes of devotion within a liturgical context: specifically, for the Good Friday Vespers service at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig.103 It is worth remembering that, despite its irrefutable popularity and secure place today as a pillar of Western Classical music, it was performed on very few occasions during Bach’s lifetime: besides its first performance, it was revived on 30 March 1736 and perhaps again in 1740. It seems shocking to us now that were it not for Felix Mendelssohn, who
100 Calvin R. Stapert, My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000): 7-11. 101 Eric Chafe, “Key Structure and Tonal Allegory in the Passions of J.S. Bach: An Introduction.” (Current Musicology, 31,1981): 40. Sensus and scopus appear to refer to direct (immediate, literal) and overall (deeper, moral/allegorical/anagogical) meanings of a text. 102 Uri Golomb, “Liturgical drama in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion,” Goldberg Early Music Magazine 39 (2016), 48- 59. 103 Robin A. Leaver. J.S. Bach as Preacher: His Passions and Music in Worship. (St. Louis, Missouri: Concordia, 1982): 9. For many years scholars believed the first performance to have taken place on 15 April 1729; now a date two years earlier—11 April 1727—is agreed upon.
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revived the work in 1829 in Berlin, rescuing it from oblivion, we might never have come to know this masterpiece.104 It is an epic work, and can be divided into two parts (Part One ends with the arrest of Jesus). It is written for double choir (used effectively in dialogue) and double orchestra; it features the Baroque instruments the oboes da caccia and the viol da gamba. The entirety of the Gospel Passion narrative according to Matthew is set, word-for-word, with interpolated chorales and free poetry by Henrici (known by his pen-name, Picander) set as ariosi (or recitatives) and arias. Four soloists of each voice part sing these movements, and soloists sing the parts called for in the Gospel narrative. To be sure, by the standards of Bach’s day, as well as our own time, it is a monumental work.
Isabella van Elferen describes the theological intent of the Passion tradition at the time of Bach:
The devotional genre that demanded the greatest possible intensity of affect in poetic or musical language was the Passion meditation. Because Christ’s death on the cross was regarded as the ultimate proof of God’s love for mankind, the Passion story is the emotional zenith of Lutheran theology. Consciousness of the immeasurable greatness of God’s love and of his own unworthiness should awaken repentance and grateful reciprocal love in the believer. On these grounds Luther emphasized the significance of active experience of affect in the Passion meditation. This emotional purpose behind the Passion meditation was forcefully formulated by Lutheran devotional theologians of the baroque period, who recommended active religious participation of individual believers. Rostock theologian Heinrich Müller, for instance, writes, “We owe, after all, the greatest love to the crucified Jesus. Let us love him, for he has first loved us.”105
The St. Matthew Passion follows this model. Bach’s use of musical affect evokes, interprets, and invites the participation of the individual through devotional prayer and meditation, thought to be the “best way to approach God,” and with the Protestant Reformation, newly made available to the common people.106 Thus, the St. Matthew Passion is not only a “sermon in sound,” in Robin Leaver’s phrase,107 but also a devotional experience for the individual believer, whose voice, in response to the Gospel text, can be heard in arioso, aria, and chorale. These movements serve to
104 Denis Herlin, from liner notes of: Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthäus-Passion. Perf. The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, et. al. Cond. Ton Koopman. (Erato Disques, 1993): 16-17. 105 Isabella van Elferen. Mystical Love in the German Baroque: Theology, Poetry, Music. (Maryland: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009): 92. 106 Rosalie Athol Schellhous, “Form and Spirituality in Bach's St. Matthew Passion.” (The Musical Quarterly Vol. 71, No. 3, Anniversaries: 1, 1985): 300. 107 Robin A. Leaver, J.S. Bach as Preacher, 19.
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illuminate, as well as reflect and comment upon, the gospel from the perspective of the believer. In this way, the believer is drawn in and implicated in the story unfolding before her. Schellhous describes the formula:
The procedure of meditation is as follows: the story is presented, the scene is examined or expanded upon, a lesson is drawn, and the worshipper responds with an expression of personal feeling. Furthermore, the meditation depends on sensory experience to increase its effectiveness.108 These expressions of “personal feeling,” given voice in chorales, recitatives, and especially arias, are not, however, withdrawn from the drama, but incorporated seamlessly. Furthermore, participation in the singing of the well-known chorale tunes underlines the unique involvement of the believer, which implicates the listener and makes him or her a character in the story.
For Luther, Passion meditation served three chief purposes: “(1) recognition and acknowledgment of sin; (2) the growth of faith through love and casting one’s sins on Christ; and (3) the Passion as the model for Christian life.”109 All are made use of in the St. Matthew Passion. It is primarily the second, the arousal of love for Christ, which concerns us here, and which can, in fact, be said to permeate the whole of the work. Virtually every arioso and aria in the St. Matthew Passion can be analyzed with reference to the theme of mystical love, which Isabella van Elferen calls “the core of the Lutheran Passion theology”.110
In the midst of the trial before Pilate, just at the height of emotional and dramatic tension, when the crowd is clamouring for Jesus’s condemnation, comes the soprano Aria “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben,”111 which Elferen calls the “theological core of the St. Matthew Passion[.]”112 The action pauses to allow for the heart-rent interjection of the voice of the believer, wrought with painful awareness of Christ’s innocence and the great love out of which he is willing to die for the sake of our salvation. Love unto death is the object of our contemplation in this aria, the love of Christ for His own, even “to the end,”113 that moves the believer to reciprocal love.
108 Schellhous, “Form and Spirituality,” 298. 109 Chafe, Tonal Allegory in the Music of J.S. Bach, 339. 110 Elferen, Mystical Love in the German Baroque, 249. 111 A beautiful performance, with soprano Dorothee Mields and Herreweghe conducting the Cologne Philharmonie and Collegium Vocale can be heard here:
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Table 4: Text and translation of “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben”114 Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben, Out of love my Saviour is willing to die, Von einer Sünde weiß er nichts, Though he knows nothing of any sin, Daß das ewige Verderben So that eternal ruin Und die Strafe des Gerichts And the punishment of judgment Nicht auf meiner Seele bliebe. May not rest upon my soul.
The instrumentation of this movement is noteworthy and symbolic. The subtle instrumentation, comprised of only solo soprano voice, flute, and the oboes da caccia,115 and missing the groundedness of the continuo, creates a unique atmosphere of stillness, reverence and incompleteness, and allows this aria to stand out in the work as a whole. The continuo, an ever- present harmonic support, disappears, lending a sense of fragility, even vulnerability. The lack of a continuo part in the movement seems to make us aware of the abandonment, loneliness, and humanity of Jesus standing before the ordeal of His passion and death, and to move the listener to compassion. The harmonic support is provided instead by the unique, soft-toned oboes da caccia. These, according to Eric Chafe, whenever they appear in the work, represent God’s love.116 In this movement, their presence reminds us of the cause of Christ’s suffering—His great love. The oboes da caccia, in steady quarter notes punctuated by dotted-rhythms (usually at phrase endings), move the harmony forward with a gentleness and yet an insistency, suggesting a sense of the inexorability of what has now been set in motion by Christ’s submission to see the passion through, in obedience to the will of His Father. As well, the oboes da caccia, representing love, play a painful chromatic descending motion to represent the suffering bound up in that love. The fact that the oboes da caccia provide the harmonic support for this aria (taking on the role of the absent continuo) suggest to Eric Chafe that here they “indicate love as the foundation of the human relationship with Jesus”.117
The delicate solo flute traces a melody by turns haunting and tender, a counterpart to the emotive
114 Translator unknown, accessed online at
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melody of solo soprano voice. The soprano articulates the central meaning of the Passion story, highlighting first and foremost the love out of which Christ undergoes the torments of His passion and submits to a cruel death for the sake of sinful humanity: the strange paradox of the innocent being willing to take the place of the guilty. It is cause for both joy and sorrow; anguish and relief, and ultimately, reverence and awe for the overwhelming act of love on display brought home by the realization that it is for “my” sake that Christ is willing to die. The soprano’s melody line contains an intimation of stillness (i.e. the repeated F at bar 18) which underscores that Christ has “done nothing” to warrant punishment, except love, expressed musically through the motion of the flowing 16th-note passages in the flute.118 The repeated notes in the vocal melody also seem to suggest the believer’s protesting insistence that Christ is innocent, a counterweight to the crowd’s condemnation of Jesus in answer to Pilate’s question, “What evil has he done?” in the scene which bookends the aria.119 (See Figure 4.1.) In the soprano part, similar long, languorous lines emphasize the key words Liebe (love) and Sterben (death), linking the two concepts.120 Paul Steinitz also points out the recurring pauses on various poignant chords, always occurring on the resolution of the word “Sterben,” such as at bar 53 (a diminished 7th on G#), which, for him, “express far better than words could the reaction of a devoted follower to the agony of the Passion”.121 These pauses seem like breathless, horror- stricken gasps for air — the observer cannot believe that this could be happening. Over the pause at bar 53 alluded to above, the soprano strains to finish the extended melodic line on “Sterben,” sustaining and returning to the F which cements the harmony as the anguished and alienating diminished 7th. Following this moment, Bach resolves the phrase by combining two of the darkest and most discordant musical elements of his time: the augmented fourth (the so-called “diabolus in musica”) and the diminished 7th. (See Figure 4.2.)
118 Elferen, Mystical Love in the German Baroque, 288. 119 The soprano recitative which precedes the aria strongly defends Jesus in this way by articulating all of the good He has in fact done: “He has done good to us all./ He gave sight to the blind,/ The lame he made to walk;/ He told us his Father’s word,/ He drove the devil’s forth;/ The wretched he has raised up;/ He received and sheltered sinners;/ Nothing else has my Jesus done.” Translator unknown.
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Figure 4.1: The opening of the aria. Note the spare and delicate instrumentation: flute, oboes da caccia, soprano. Note the soprano’s languorous line highlighting “Liebe” (love) at measure 14-16, contrasted with the insistence/standing still of the repeated note in measure 18.
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The emphases on Christ’s love in death and the emotional response of the believer are characteristic of Lutheran Passion theology. Hearkening back to medieval mysticism, Lutheran theologians such as Neumeister, Gerhard, and Heinrich Müller (the latter an especial influence on many of the devotional Picander texts for the St. Matthew Passion)122 linked the concept of Christ as heavenly bridegroom with His death, undergone out of love for the believer. In her work on mystical love in the German Baroque, Isabella van Elferen explains:
In Passion sermons and poems [of the German Baroque] Christ was consistently described as a loving bridegroom who died on the cross out of deeply felt love for the faithful soul, His bride. His suffering and death, often represented as a love-death, was a sign of “His heartfelt, ardent love for us” (Gerhard).123 Christ’s death serves as proof of His love, and allows for eventual, eschatological, mystical union with the believer. Neumeister even calls Christ a “blood-bridegroom;” and Müller calls Christ’s four wounds “four witnesses who cry out all at once: Ah, love! Love! Love! God’s love for us men!”124 The Lutheran Passion devotion painted Christ very much in this light. The believers were to meditate on Christ’s “love-death,” be moved to love in response, and hurry to meet Him in personal prayer and Communion, as a bride to her husband.
In “Aus Liebe,” Bach creates a musico-liturgical drama within a drama into which the believer can enter contemplatively. The Saviour, about to undergo suffering and death, is contemplated by those who look on in faith, sorrow, and wonder at the great love that underlies this act. The aria, while enacting contemplation and devotion, becomes itself an opportunity for such, personally involving the believer in the Passion story, and creating an occasion for prayerful reflection, adoration, and an encounter with the beauty of Christ’s love, through music. In the midst of the unfolding of the Passion story, with its cruelty and horror, the aria allows the listener to take a step back and observe the scene with the eyes of faith, to perceive its beauty, and enter into the story imaginatively, with love and compassion. In this contemplative space, the “beauty” of the cross is revealed to be the love with which Christ endures it for our sake. The ugliness of an innocent man’s unjust condemnation and execution becomes the beauty of God’s willingness
122 Schellhous, “Form and Spirituality,” 296. 123 Elferen. Mystical Love in the German Baroque, 185. 124 Ibid., 190-191.
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to sacrifice all for us “aus liebe” — out of love.
Figure 4.2: Pauses in m. 52 and 56; augmented 4th in the soprano melody at m. 67; and the diminished 7th in the harmony at m. 53 and spelled out by the soprano at m. 56.
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Arvo Pärt: “The Beatitudes,” for SATB choir and organ (1990)125 The music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) is often spoken of in terms suggestive of spirituality. Professed believers and people of no religious affiliation alike tend to turn to the language of the spiritual to find words for the effect of Pärt’s music: “pure, honest, simple, essential, transparent . . . angelic, oceanic, contemplative, reflective, mystical, ethereal, transcendent.”126 Not without reason, Pärt’s music has been likened to an icon in sound,127 transparent, static, pure, and spacious enough to allow the light through; something inviting contemplation and awareness of a hidden reality, which it somehow mediates and makes present. What is it about Pärt’s music that people of diverse backgrounds find so spiritually evocative, moving, even nourishing? To answer this we cannot overlook the composer’s own spiritual roots in the Orthodox Christian tradition. In Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence, a beautifully integrative study of the composer’s music in relation to his Orthodox faith, Peter C. Bouteneff elaborates upon two themes in Pärt’s music that find correlations in the theology and spirituality of the Eastern Church: “out of silence” and “bright sadness”.128
Silence and stillness are important components of Pärt’s musical style, in terms of a preponderance of literal rests, as a quality of simplicity evoked by the paring down of textures, and as an ethos that informs his compositional method. In an interview in 1988, the composer spoke about his understanding of silence as a sacred birthing place of music:
Before one says something, perhaps it is better to say nothing. My music has emerged only after I have been silent for quite some time. Literally silent. For me, ‘silent’ means the ‘nothing’ from which God created the world. Ideally a silent pause is something sacred . . . If someone approaches silence with love, then this might give birth to music. A composer must often wait a long time for his music. This kind of sublime anticipation is exactly the kind of pause I value so greatly.129
125 A recording by the Elora Festival Singers conducted by Noel Edison, from the album Arvo Pärt: Berliner Messe, Naxos, 2004, can be found here:
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Initially engaged in the avant garde techniques of Easter European musical modernism, Pärt underwent a transitional period as a composer between 1968 and 1976, commonly known as his “silent period.” Bouteneff calls this hiatus a kind of “creative impasse,”130 following which Pärt emerged with a radically new compositional style, named tintinnabulli, after the Latin for “sounding bells.”131 This was an enormous breakthrough for the composer: the discovery of a musical language that made use of tonality in a non-functional way, characterized by an evocation of stillness, silence, and purity through reduction and the imposition of compositional rules. Following the silence of crisis and absence came another kind of silence altogether: a meaningful, profound silence of presence and focus.
Music and silence have a complex relationship. On the one hand, we normally think of silence as the opposite of music — simply the empty void which music can fill. On the other, we can understand silence as the shadow that defines the light, without which sound becomes mere noise, indistinguishable and meaningless.132 There is the axiom, variously attributed to Mozart, Debussy, and Miles Davis, that music is not so much in the notes themselves as in the space between the notes.133 Silence, too, as in Pärt’s quotation above, is the birthplace of music: its beginning, something which shapes the music it produces.134 Silence, too, is music’s end: the non-music into which music must recede. Conductor Paul Hillier describes the relationship between music and silence in terms of time and eternity, life and death:
All music emerges from silence, to which sooner or later it must return. At its simplest we may conceive of music as the relationship between sounds and the silence that surrounds them. Yet silence is an imaginary state in which all sounds are absent, akin perhaps to the infinity of time and space that surrounds us. We cannot ever hear utter silence, nor can we fully imagine such concepts as infinity and eternity. When we create music, we express life. But the source of music is silence, which is the ground of our musical being, the fundamental note of life. How we live depends on our
130 Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 86-91. 131 Paul Hillier describes the way in which ringing of a bell, associated with liturgical rites, takes us to the very nature of sound and its mysterious unifying effect: “If a single bell is struck, and we contemplate the nature of its sound—the Klang at impact, the spread of sound after this initial gesture, and then the lingering cloud of resonance—what we hear takes us to the heart of tintinnabuli. A finely wrought bell makes one of the most mysterious and creative sounds: a sound that certainly ‘rings out’ and reaches towards us, yet at the same time pulls us in towards it, so that soon we realize we are on the inside of it, that its inside and outside are in fact one and the same.” Paul Hillier, Arvo Pärt (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997; 2002), 20. 132 Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 106-7. 133 Ibid., 96-7. 134 Ibid., 125-137.
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relationship with death; how we make music depends on our relationship with silence.135
Peter Bouteneff develops the theme of silence in the Eastern Christian tradition with reference to its multivalent spiritual meanings. Silence is the “ex nihilo,” the creative emptiness out of which creation, the “Big Bang,” sounds forth. It can be seen in terms of God’s absence136— as in the Psalmist’s lamenting plea, “O God, do not remain silent, do not turn a deaf ear, do not stand aloof, O God”137 — or of God’s presence — as in “the still small voice” (or the paradoxical “sound of sheer silence,” as the NRSV has it) heard by Elijah.138 Silence is the attitude of awe before God, a speechlessness befitting mortals in the presence of the immortal (as in the hymn “Let all mortal flesh keep silence”).139 Silence is instruction, speech, and witness about God,140 as in the testimony given by creation itself (“The heavens declare the glory of God . . . . They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world”141). There is also the silence of unknowing, the “Via Negativa,” by which we reach the God who surpasses all we can say of Him. Then, there is the silence of Christ: the self-silencing of His kenosis in becoming human, at certain moments in his ministry, His non-resistance and speechlessness before His accusers during His passion (“Do not resist one who does evil”), and the profound silence of the tomb, the descent into death.142
Resonant with all of these meanings is the practice of silence in prayer. 143 Exterior silence is meant to cultivate and so mirror interior silence, a self-diminishment and emptying to allow God to enter, a quieting of noise in order to listen to the voice of God in the depths of the human heart. It is a posture of humility and openness, as in the ascetic and monastic practices of keeping silence at designated times, or as an entire way of life, as in the “Great Silence” or vow of silence. Hesychia is the Greek term for the Eastern Christian practice of cultivating stillness of
135 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 1. 136 Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 107-110. 137 Psalm 83:1 (NIV). 138 1 Kings 19:12. 139 Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 110-114. 140 Ibid., 114-116. 141 Psalm 19:1,3,4 (NIV). 142 Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 116-118. 143 Recently, Robert Cardinal Sarah of Guinea has written a much-acclaimed book on the importance of silence as a gateway to an authentic encounter with God. Amid the incessant “noise” of modern culture, keeping silence as a posture of humility and waiting before God becomes a counter-cultural act. The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017).
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mind and body, in order to fix the rapt attention of the mind, heart, soul, intellect on God alone.144 “The term ‘hesychasm’ implies stillness, silence, tranquillity, and also stability, being seated, fixed in concentration. . . . The ideal of tranquillity should not be viewed as an invitation to inaction. The hesychast way calls for the practice of pure prayer and a constant watchfulness over heart and mind. The condition it espouses is not simply silence, but an attitude of listening to God.”145 The practice of brief, repetitive, “monologic prayer,” as in the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me,”146 belongs to this tradition.
The second major theme Bouteneff expounds in his study of Pärt and Orthodox spirituality is that of “bright sadness,” a term referring to the paradox of joy through affliction that is so much a part of Christian life and the mystery of the Cross. Bright sadness is joy in and through sorrow; the dynamic of lament and rejoicing, fallenness and redemption.147 Lent is an example: a liturgical period of penance and self-denial in order to refocus our gaze upon the joy to be found in God, in preparation to meet the Risen Christ at Easter: “It is a chosen darkening of the night in order to brighten our perception of the stars.”148 More broadly though, this expression touches on the reality of redemption in the midst of the ongoing experience of fallenness, holding in tension the goodness of the world and of human nature despite their brokenness. It is the suffering of Christ on the cross, in which all Christians have a share, wrapped up in the glory of the Resurrection. On the eve of His suffering, Jesus assures His disciples at the Last Supper of the promise of grief changed to joy: “Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. . . . I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”149 This is the promise of Isaiah 25:8, that “the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.” While this decisive victory has already been won in Christ, while the kingdom has already been inaugurated, we have yet to see its full realization.
To return to Pärt, this ethos of “bright sadness” can be seen, argues Bouteneff, in his use of
144 Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 119-122. 145 Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 8,9. 146 Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 122-125. Bouteneff clarifies that while this style of prayer is akin to the mantra in other Eastern traditions, it differs in that it is primarily a prayer addressed to Jesus, and this remains primary, not its centring and quieting effects on the human mind, body, and soul. 147 The Psalms are full of examples of this undulation between lament and hope. 148 Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 143. 149 John 16:22, 33 (NIV).
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predominantly minor keys, slow tempos, reduction of elements, and interplay of tension and resolution, suggestive of the characteristic bittersweetness of life and the mix of joy and sorrow, or “joy-in-sorrow.” The tintinnabuli system itself is comprised of two “voices,”150 the melodic and the triadic, which have been described as the straying and the stable, the human and the divine.151 The juxtaposition of these opposites suggests, on a theological level, God’s solidarity with us in our brokenness, and the encouragement of hope as we wait for the glory in store for us to be revealed.152
Arvo Pärt’s musical rendering of Matthew 5:3-12, The Beatitudes,153 provides for us a window into these two primary theological themes, expressed musically. The text, as it appears, in English, in the 1990 composition for SATB choir and organ, is as follows:
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad:
150M-voice and T-voice; terminology first employed by Hillier. 151 See Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 176-195 for a thorough and insightful presentation of this idea. 152 Bouteneff defends Pärt against the label sometimes assigned him of “Holy Minimalist” – which is to say that his music resists conflict and thus lacks any true grappling with the element of the suffering and the Cross in the Christian ethos. I agree that this characterization is not totally fair, especially given the sophisticated interplay of tension/resolution, or joy/sorrow that permeates Pärt’s work. 153 Score excerpts from Arvo Pärt “The Beatitudes für gemischten Chor (SATB) und Orgel” © Copyright 1990 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 33002. Reprinted by permission.
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for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. Amen.
The SATB choir declaims the text syllabically, phrase by phrase, pausing at the places indicated by the breaks in the text above. Each phrase is punctuated by a silence, an empty bar of rest. These pauses contribute further to the sense of timelessness created by the absence of measures of equal duration – as in chant. The text is spotlighted and given a central place, as the words and syllables are allowed to unfold at their own natural pace, with syllabic emphases carefully attended to by lengthened notes: “Bless-ed are the poor in spi-rit.” The final note of each phrase is also lengthened, alerting the ear to the resting place, which the bar of rest that follows ushers in more decidedly. Shorter pauses link clause to clause (3 pulses), while longer pauses follow a comma (6 pulses). The natural sense of parallelism in the beautiful gospel text is thus maintained and expressed: “Blessed… / for….” (See Figure 4.3.)
“Blessed are ye,” and “Rejoice,” the final two verses which serve as Jesus’s summation, break this pattern, and the more numerous clauses piling up (“revile you… and persecute you… and shall say all manner of evil… for my sake”) serve to create a sense of momentum and expectation of a climax. This comes, partially, at “Rejoice” – the one-word musical phrase that differs from all the others, and the core message of the Beatitudes, towards which each verse tends. Ultimately, though, it is the “Amen” that delivers the awaited coup de grâce, as the organ, which has so far only existed on the periphery of our hearing, providing intermittent, barely audible foundation tones, bursts onto centre stage triumphantly. (See Figure 4.4.)
It is the organ that continues playing to the end of the piece, a busy, undulating conclusion that finally fades to nothing. What is the effect of this surprising organ entrance, what can we glean from it, and what is its relationship to the rest of the piece as a whole? We will consider this after touching on the two theological themes raised by Bouteneff in relation to Part’s music, silence, and bright sadness, both of which are evident.
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Figure 4.3. The opening of the piece and first two verses. Note the 3-beat and 6-beat pauses in measures 2, 4, and 6, the chant-like syllabic text, and the organ’s role as unobtrusive support.
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Figure 4.4. The choir’s “Amen” and “surprise” organ entrance.
Silence, with all of its theological ramifications, is evoked in a variety of ways in the piece. The bars of rest that punctuate each phrase are an obvious example. (We saw similar pauses in the Bach aria we considered above.) The effect of these silent breaks is that they begin to accumulate and acquire a kind of presence of their own, so that the silence becomes integral to the music: a rich, full silence, ringing with the powerful words and sounds that preceded it and will proceed from it. The rests, built right in to the structure of the piece, allow a moment for the sound to
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settle, and the words to find their mark (see, for example, measures 2, 4, and 6 in Figure 4.3). The result is a sharpening of focus, a pinpointing of the listener’s attention. A quality of stillness is further evident in a number of musical materials. First, the general sense of reduction or “paring down,” which is characteristic of all of Pärt’s tintinnabuli music, is evident in the simple collections of pitches which form the individual melodic lines and the collective harmonies. The soprano and tenor voices sing the same wide intervals, only inversely, exchanging pitches, so that the even within the movement this creates, the listener discerns “stillness,” as no pitches within the chord are lost as a result of the exchange. The alto and bass voices, meanwhile, tend to move mostly in half or whole steps, otherwise maintaining stasis (see for example, measures 1, 3, 5, and 7 in Figure 4.3). Simple harmonies, major and minor chords, are used predominantly, especially at the ends of phrases, as moments of resolution. Finally, the organ, which is present from the very beginning, but almost subconsciously so, plays single notes, long, deep, and quiet (see for example, measures 3-5 in Figure 4.3), both as a support for and in conversation with the choral part. The organ’s ecstatic concluding solo (beginning at measure 51 in Figure 4.4) might be considered a wordless “translation” of the textual part of the piece, a rendering, in music alone, transposed into the sound world of the organ, of the message of the text. Now the voices are totally silent, and the organ sounds. The organ’s music fades little by little, until it becomes nothing, returning to the silence that has been so integral to the piece.
Next, we find the bright sadness motif. The text itself exemplifies this paradoxical combination. The sorrowful, the downtrodden, the simple, those whom the world accounts as unimportant, are assured that they will possess – and in being granted this promise, already possess – joy and blessedness. Boutneff refers to the theology of the Beatitudes as a prime example of the “bright sadness” at the heart of Christian life: “this is the kingdom that Christ has already inaugurated, a kingdom that lives in a perennial tension with the broken reality that remains. That co-existence explains why our experience of the world is so deeply mixed: a bright sadness indeed.”154
In order to express this musically, Pärt beautifully creates tiny moments of tension or dissonance (especially major or minor second “crunches”), which throw the text into relief and serve to reinforce the resolutions, at the ends of phrases especially, to which they give way. The harmonies on the word “Blessed” are often, strictly speaking, dissonant, or contain “added” notes
154 Bouteneff, Out of Silence, 163.
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not native to the triad they otherwise suggest, tending toward ambiguity (see for example, the chord on “Blessed” in measure 1 seen in Figure 4.3). An examination of the “resolution” chords, which I hear at the end of each phrase on the final syllable, reveals the interplay of minor and major tonalities: the sorrowful alongside the joyful.
Table 5: Resolutions on final syllables of phrases in Part’s “The Beatitudes” Blessed are the poor in spirit: F minor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. D-flat major Blessed are they that mourn: D minor for they shall be comforted. F major Blessed are the meek: D minor for they shall inherit the earth. B-flat major Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: G minor for they shall be filled. E-flat major Blessed are the merciful: C minor for they shall obtain mercy. G major Blessed are the pure in heart: E minor for they shall see God. C major Blessed are the peacemakers: A minor for they shall be called the children of God. F major Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: D minor for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. A major Blessed are ye, F# minor when men shall revile you, D major and persecute you, B minor and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, GABC cluster for my sake. E minor Rejoice, A#BC# cluster and be exceeding glad: G# minor for great is your reward in heaven: E major for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you. C# minor
A pattern, as seen in the chart above, begins to emerge: a minor chord resolution for the end of the first phrase, and a major chord resolution for the second phrase of each pair. (This pattern breaks down for the last two verses, which lack the parallelism of the previous 8.) At a basic level, this goes to the heart of the meaning of the text, itself a promise of the reversal of fortunes for those who suffer. Minor gives way to major. The minor in the first clause is related to the major in the second, but always in new and surprising ways. Lest we grant too facile a connection between minor as sad and major as happy, we can attend to the deeply ambiguous cluster chord resolutions which appear at two key moments towards the end: on “falsely” and on
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“Rejoice.” These clusters are neither major nor minor, though they take the place of the expected major chord, which according to the pattern should alternate with the minor. Their dissonant nature is somehow both unpleasant and satisfying to the ear. Somehow, they are both things at once: sorrow and joy commingled, mourning yet blessed (or, strikingly, as “beatus” might also be rendered, “happy”).
A final point, to return to the question of the organ’s unexpected glorious entrance at the conclusion of the work: it seems to me that there are a few different ways of interpreting this conclusion symbolically. The one which strikes me, and which connects to the theme of contemplation and listening we have been discussing in this chapter, is to think of the organ as a representation of the listening disciple. Throughout the piece, the organ’s “silent soundings” are present, making space for the words of Christ’s teaching to unfold. Finally, at the conclusion, the organ, as believer, responds rapturously, a final affirmation (“AMEN,” in measure 50 in Figure 4.4) of all that has been heard. When the organ goes on to play its faster-moving solo, it is in contrast with the stillness and quietness that has gone before, and yet by the same token, it clearly grows out from that stillness and is related thematically to the content of it. It is as though the organ-as-believer is now sent out to evangelize, translating what it has heard into its “own words.” The listening one now sounds forth, transformed and emboldened by what has been heard in the silence. To use an image we encountered above, we might think of the whole piece prior to this organ conclusion as the “silence” which “gives birth” to the conclusion.
Conclusion “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops,” Christ tells his apostles in Matthew 10:27 when he sends them out. This is the final movement that follows the transformative aspect of the contemplative encounter, a movement outward to the world, in selfless love. It is this movement, this active proclaiming, serving, and witnessing of Christian discipleship – and its relationship to the dynamic of music – to which we will turn in the next chapter.
For the moment, we can, with Bach and Pärt fresh in our mind’s ear, return to the question that has driven this chapter: is there a correspondence between listening to music and contemplative prayer?
I have argued that a truly engaged, participatory listening, such that music can encourage and
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help us to develop, is compatible with the attentive, self-silencing attitude adopted in contemplative prayer. For this reason, engaging in music can be spiritually propaedeutic, engendering a capacity for spiritual openness akin to musical listening. Acts of listening to affecting and transformative music can also serve us as models of what takes place on a spiritual plane when we enter into a profound contemplation of the divine, resulting in being overtaken by beauty and transformed by it. Finally, we have seen how music can (as in the case of Bach and Pärt) itself create contemplative spaces, frameworks, or launching pads into contemplative prayer. By attracting, holding, and directing our attention towards the hidden reality of the mystery of God’s love for us, music of this kind can become a sonic icon, mediating an experience of the beauty and light of the transcendent God.
Chapter Five: Music, Christian Discipleship, and Fruitfulness
“Freely you have received; freely give.” –Christ sending out the apostles (Mt. 10:8 NIV)
At the outset of this work, I posited that music, in the way that it engages the totality of the human person through beauty, has the potential to open us to real encounters with God, and a deepening awareness of God’s presence, which we might term “sacramental.” As we have worked through the various themes that have guided our study – sacramentality, incarnation, beauty, and contemplation – my intention has been to unpack this claim with reference to the Church’s theological and spiritual tradition, used as a lamp to cast a light onto music via various musical exemplars, wherein I discerned sacred spaces in which God may speak. Understanding musical events as possible occasions for a “theophany” is a powerful way of affirming God’s radical, ongoing presence to and in creation, and the conjunction between “materiality” and “spirit” in so much of human life. Such sacramental musical experiences, like all authentic encounters with the divine, do not leave one unchanged. Rather, the result of having drawn closer to God and heard God’s voice in the midst of the music of humanity is transformation, deepening conversion, and the movement outward toward the world in love, to share what has been received.
Again, an examination of music is instructive for us as we note the dynamic of creative fruitfulness that emerges from the contemplative encounter with God. As we saw at the beginning, music by definition is embodied, sounding in time and space, and action-based. Music proper is never simply the notes on a page, but a lived-out experience among human beings. Christian spirituality, too, must have an active, manifest component in order to be authentic. We can see a parallel between the sounding forth of music following a period of silence and the charitable works of Christian discipleship following prayer.
In this chapter, I will consider the missional, vocational, and pastoral ramifications of a robust theology of musical sacramentality, asking “to what” is the beautiful, through music, calling the Church, the Christian generally, and the Christian artist in particular, entwined with the person and vocation of Mary. Exploring this, we depart somewhat from the format we have established, in order to summarize, conclude, and point the way forward. I will begin by considering
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“fruitfulness,” both as a criterion of Christian discipleship and as the culmination of the mystical trajectory. To close, I will move to a reflection on the Blessed Virgin Mary as a model of Christian discipleship and fruitfulness in the way of beauty, incorporating two Marian chants by Hildegard of Bingen.
Service, Charity, and Fruitfulness as Christian Discipleship
In John’s gospel, at the Last Supper, Jesus performs an incredible gesture at table with the disciples:
[He] got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. . . . After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. . . . If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.[”]1
In this striking and symbolic action, the essentials of Christ’s mission are manifest: Christ has stepped down from glory, “taking the form of a slave,”2 and gives Himself in love through humble, self-emptying service, expressed personally, concretely, and physically for His own (as well as the specific task entrusted Him by the Father to cleanse those who belong to Him of the filth of sin). This humble gesture, which must have shocked the disciples (and causes Peter to protest), is held up as an example: just as Jesus is a humble servant, so too ought His disciples to be – placing themselves at the “lowest place,”3 so that God may be glorified in them.
Jesus’s example, in perfect harmony with His teaching, of humble service, is echoed in the “new commandment” He gives on the same occasion, in the very same chapter: “Love one another.”4 Christ’s own are to love one another as He has loved them – that is, to the end, to the utmost, with God’s own love. This love is the very hallmark of Christian discipleship, the way one who truly belongs to Christ is to be known. It is a love that takes concrete form in acts of loving
1 John 13:4-5, 12-15, 17. 2 Philippians 2:7. 3 “Move up higher, friend” – cf. Luke 14:8-11. 4 John 13:34-35, also John 15:17.
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service of neighbour. Paul’s beautiful paean to love in 1 Corinthians 13 refers to the primacy of this love, without which great deeds are rendered void, that is at once supremely gentle and supremely resilient, and that crowns faith and hope as that which endures beyond even them. Christ’s example of loving service is always lived concretely and generously for others. In His love, He embraces the outcasts, heals those afflicted in body, mind, and spirit, feeds those who hunger for God’s presence, comforts those who mourn, announces good news to the poor,5 and ultimately accepts the Cross.
Charged with imitating the Lord in His example and obeying the injunction to love, the disciples of Christ also are to be known by their fruitfulness, a task with which they are appointed: “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last. . . .”6 Jesus uses the image of the vine and the branches to describe the relationship between Himself and those who find the source of all their good works in Him. They flow forth from Him and produce fruit the closer they remain united to Him. The branch itself remains humble, knowing that without remaining united to the vine, it can produce nothing and is sure to wither. The fruit it does produce finds its origin in the vine, and its fruit is not for its own sake, but glorifies the Father, “the gardener.”7 “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. . . . This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”8 This image of the Father as the gardener, planting and tending to those He planted in order to bear fruit, recalls the original plan for the flourishing of humanity in Genesis.
The gospels are full of accounts of Christ’s intentional commissioning and sending of the disciples, and the fruitfulness to which all Christians are called.9 Christ’s commissioning of His disciples at various points of the synoptic gospels reinforces this overall call to “go into all the world,”10 to take up the cross after Him,11 to become His “ambassadors” who labour on His
5 See Luke 4:18-20, in which Christ identifies himself at the beginning of his ministry with the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy when he reads from the scroll. 6 John 15:16. 7 John 15:1. 8 John 15:5, 8. 9 Sending of the seventy in Luke 10:1-3; the Great Commission in Matthew 28:16-20; the Appointing of the Twelve in Matthew 10, Mark 3, and Luke 6. 10 Mark 16:15, immediately preceding the Ascension. 11 Matthew 16:24; Luke 9:23.
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behalf.12 “Go and do likewise,” He invites those who hear His message of God’s lavish mercy;13 “Be merciful, as your Heavenly Father is merciful.”14 Works of mercy are the very criteria for discipleship. In the pronouncement on the Last Judgement in Matthew 25 (when the sheep are to be separated from the goats), it is those whose acts of mercy were manifest that are rewarded with eternal life.15 “You are the light of the world,” Jesus tells His followers; whose light should shine before others, like a city atop a hill.16 Like Mary of Bethany, anointing Christ’s feet with a precious perfume whose fragrance fills the whole household, the sweet and invigorating fragrance of our humble and sacrificial deeds done in love should spread far and wide.17 We can observe, too, the many ways in which people in the gospels are transformed and impelled to respond in love and freedom after encountering Jesus. The physical healings (including raising from the dead) and driving out of demons are concrete and powerful ways that Jesus effects transformation in those to whom He ministers. More subtle but no less powerful are the changes of heart and the conversions. Levi the tax-collector leaves his old life in an instant to follow Jesus, and in his newfound joy, hosts a banquet in His honour.18 Zacchaeus goes above and beyond in making amends and undoing his dishonesty.19 This response also takes the form of witness. The Samaritan woman at the well leaves her water jar behind and rushes back to her village to bring others to Jesus.20 Even in the poignant scene between the Risen Christ and Mary Magdelene, Christ commissions and sends Mary, placing the priority—not in lingering in the private bliss of seeing Him again, but—on spreading the good news: “Do not hold on to me . . . Go instead to my brothers and tell them . . . .”21 This sending is echoed in the dismissal of the Mass. Having received Christ, the faithful go out to share Christ with others: Ite, missa est – “Go, you are sent.” We are entrusted with a message – the kerygma of our words, deeds, and presence.
12 2 Corinthians 5:20. 13 Luke 10:37, following the parable of the Good Samaritan. 14 Luke 6:36, in the context of the teaching on loving one’s enemies. 15 Verses 31-46. 16 Matthew 5:14-16. 17 John 12:1-3. 18 Luke 5:27-32. 19 Luke 19:8. 20 John 4:28-29. 21 John 20:17.
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Service, Charity, and Fruitfulness as the Culmination of the Mystic Way
Authentic witness, ambassadorship, and service on behalf of Christ entails first a real, personal encounter with Him; a reception of Christ’s call and person, allowing oneself to be penetrated by His love and truth. Fruitfulness must spring from being intimately joined to the vine. Any genuine response to the call to serve and to bear fruit must spring from a relationship: a being-in- relation initiated by Christ. How natural then to desire to bring others to Him, to allow one’s service and labour to be infused by the power of the bond of love that is its source.
In a real way, the response of concrete works of service, motivated by love and springing from relationship, can be understood as the natural culmination of the encounter with the divine, of the sacramental experience, and of the mystical itinerary. The latter can be corroborated with a brief survey of the “mystic way,” traditionally understood as a progression from Purgation, through Illumination, to Union.22 Far from escaping into a private bliss of union, we can see an emphasis on active engagement with the world in service as the crown of the mystical life.
In her celebrated work, Mysticism,23 Evelyn Underhill elaborates on this general schema to outline her conception of the mystic way on the journey towards final mystical consummation. The way itself is a process of growth, a movement towards a goal, a remaking of the soul involving both painful and pleasurable states of ever-widening awareness and openness to Divine Reality. Underhill delineates five steps or aspects. The first is the Awakening of the Self, the first touch of the consciousness by the Divine. As a reaction to the awareness of one’s finiteness and imperfection compared to the Infinite Divine Perfection, a period of Purgation ensues. With increasing detachment from the sensory world comes Illumination, in which a deeper knowledge of and intimacy with God begins to be enjoyed. The Dark Night of the Soul is the final excruciating purification process by which nothing, not even the self, remains which can stand as a barrier between the mystic and the Absolute. At last the soul, emptied of self, may reach Union, oneness with God and a permanent state of bliss.
22 While the concept of a mystical itinerary suggests that the mystic actively makes progress along a set path, this is partially true but somewhat misleading. Any mystical gifts, states, or insights are always given by God and cannot be actively achieved by the mystic (or contemplative, or simple believer) on their own power. One can, however, dispose oneself to receive fully any gifts God desires to impart. 23 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. (London: Metheun & Co. Ltd: 1911. Reprint of the 12th edition, E.P. Dutton and Company: 1930; Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.: 2002).
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Past the Dark Night of the Soul – for those mystics who press on bravely – stands the ultimate destination of the mystic way in this lifetime, which Underhill calls the Unitive Life. That which the soul experienced as fleeting in exalted moments of prayer it now possesses perpetually. The Unitive Life is integrative of the whole person, who now lives in the world but not of the world. Those great souls to whom it is given to attain it, having run ahead of the rest of humanity, experience a measure of Eternal Life in the here-and-now, and are granted “a form of consciousness which other men will only know when earthly life is past”.24 This is the true “Theopathetic” life, a permanent state of union with God, a participation in Eternity. Truth is known not as a fleeting glimpse but as a home. It is union with God as a lived reality: “no mere act of knowing, however intense, exultant, and sublime, but a condition of being”.25
Living the Unitive Life is the final attainment of Absolute Life on this plane of existence, the consummation of that towards which the mystic has struggled from the beginning. To draw from three metaphors Underhill employs, the pilgrim arrives home, the betrothed consummates the marriage, the impure metal becomes gold. Underhill calls it “the flower of mysticism, humanity’s top note,” “living at the transcendent levels of reality”.26 Those who have attained to this level Underhill sees as pioneers of humanity, great saints who accomplish superhuman deeds because of their access to super-normal vitality. “It is impossible,” she says, “to over-estimate their importance for the race. They are our ambassadors to the Absolute”.27
It is the surrender of the self – body and soul – through the painful self-denial of the Dark Night, which makes possible the freedom and openness to God of the Unitive Life. Self-emptying now makes way for the Divine nature to come and fill the mystic. Crucifixion gives way to the new life of the Resurrection. The mystic becomes a conduit for God.
The intimate-personal concept of the spiritual marriage serves as a potent metaphor for this exalted state by introducing the language of love, passion, relationship, and fruitfulness. Entering into the Unitive Life, the soul enters into an unbreakable bond of marriage with her Beloved, suggesting a powerful and eternal companionship as well as participation in a shared life. This is not really self-loss but rather self-fulfillment, as two become one. Just as earthly marriage does,
24 Ibid., 424. 25 Ibid., 418. 26 Ibid., 413. 27 Ibid., 414.
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it brings new responsibilities and obligations; most importantly, parenthood. The children of the soul, brought to birth by union with God, are good works.
At last the interior-directed focus of so much of Underhill’s presentation of the mystic way is finally balanced by exterior action for justice and the spiritual renewal of fellow human beings. Compassionate and selfless service of others –caritas – is an essential outward form of the Unitive Life, and Underhill cites a number of examples – St. Paul, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Siena, and so on – to highlight the radical engagement of the mystic in the world. The abundant life and love with which the mystic is so intimately connected seem to overflow to all the world, as the mystic integrates contemplation and action, and returns from silence and seclusion to become a great centre of spiritual innovation and contact point with the Divine for others.28
Along with tireless service and action for justice and peace in the world is the mystic’s inner sense of everlasting peace and a consciousness of being enfolded in love and joy: outwardly serving and busy with God’s work, inwardly resting securely in God’s love. Underhill calls this twofold character of the Unitive Life the “double nature of man’s reaction to Reality”.29 It is the play between tranquility and activity, repose and fecundity, stillness and dynamism, action and fruition, transcendence and immanence, the eternal and the temporal.
An example of this harmonized duality is to be found in Meister Eckhart’s preaching on Martha and Mary. In a striking turn from convention, Eckhart in his Sermon 930 uses the story of the two sisters in Luke 10 to cast Martha in the more positive light, as a symbol of the Christian so united to Christ that she remains with Him even while engaged in the busyness of everyday life: “In Eckhart's treatment, Martha symbolizes the integrated contemplative—a woman who does not lose her capacity for contemplation when she is fully active and engaged with worldly work.”31 This ideal of “integrated contemplation” does not create a false dichotomy between contemplation and action, or eschew engagement with the world as something to be hurried
28 Cf. Susan Rakoczy, I.H.M., Great Mystics and Social Justice: Walking on the Two Feet of Love (New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2006). 29 Underhill, Mysticism, 434. 30 Meister Eckhart, “Sermon Nine” (Pf 9, Q 86, QT 28, Evans II, 2); 83-90 in The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. Trans. and ed. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009). 31 Janet K. Ruffing, R.S.M., “Martha and Mary: Integrating or Disintegrating Images for Action and Contemplation,” The Journal of the Mercy Association in Scripture and Theology 12:3 (2002), 21.
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through in order to get back to the more important task of private prayer. Instead, it pictures the Christian contemplative-in-action as one who remains inwardly rooted to and centered in God at all times, to the extent that this relationship informs all she does. In a warmly human image, Underhill pictures the Unitive Life as consciousness of being embraced and sustained at all times by the love of God: the mystic “emerges from that long and wondrous journey to find himself, in rest and in work, a little child upon the bosom of the Father”.32
As a result of having attained to the greatest spiritual heights possible for humanity on earth, says Underhill, the mystic now humbles herself in service. Humility and simplicity win the day, so that, again like Christ, “achieving the highest, she takes the lowest place”.33 The final stage of the mystic way, participation in divine reality, then, involves not only basking in the glory of union, but a restless and unquenchable missionary urge to bring others to the same perception and spiritual fulfillment. It is the radical re-engagement of the transformed soul with the world. Significantly, this final blossoming of the spiritual life has concrete, and we may say, “incarnate,” expression.
Mary and the Christian Vocation of Beauty
As disciples of Christ, we are tasked with making known His love, and bearing witness to Him. In order to do so, in John the Baptist’s words, the Bridegroom must increase, and we must decrease.34 We are able to radiate the beauty of Christ to the degree to which we put up no resistance to His radiance, but allow ourselves to be totally transparent to Him. In this way, as a spotless window allows a sunbeam to penetrate it and fill the room with light, we allow the form of Christ to illuminate the world through us.
The Blessed Virgin Mary is, in the Catholic imagination, the epitome of this: the model par excellence of the receptivity, transparency, and fruitfulness of the disciple. As Bishop Brendan Leahy puts it, Mary is “the model of discipleship, a discipleship of transparency to Christ.”35 Because of the perfection with which she accepts Christ from the Father and bestows him to the
32 Underhill, Mysticism, 443, emphasis added. 33 Underhill, Mysticism, 443. 34 John 3:30. 35 Brendan Leahy, The Marian Profile in the Ecclesiology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, (New York: New City Press, 2000): 88.
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world, Balthasar says, Mary’s image “represents a treasure of inviolable beauty.”36
A poem of Thomas Merton’s pictures Mary as a clear window through which the glory of God shines in unadulterated splendour:
When I became the substance of my lover, (Being obedient, sinless glass) I love all things that need my lover's life, And live to give my newborn Morning to your quiet rooms, —Your rooms, that would be tombs, Or vaults of night, and death, and terror, Fill with the clarity of living Heaven, Shine with the rays of God’s Jerusalem: O shine, bright Sions!37
Gerard Manley Hopkins, in a poem of his own, identifies Mary’s “one work”: to “Let all God’s glory through,/ God’s glory which would go/ Through her and from her flow/ Off, and no way but so.”38
In Catholic teaching, grounded by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, there is an emphasis on Mary’s purity and beauty, by virtue of her relationship to the Son. Johann Roten summarizes: “Mary is the all beautiful (tota pulchra) creature, the mirror without stain, and the supreme ideal of perfection.”39 She is also the apocalyptic woman clothed with the Sun (Rev 12:1) “in whom the pure radiance of human beauty meets the tremendous but accessible beauty of divinity”.40 Mary's beauty is caught up and illuminated by that of her Son. As the place where eternal beauty enters time, she stands for the “complementarity and harmony of human and divine beauty”.41 She is the “juncture where the communion between divinity and humanity
36 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Volume I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Joseph Fessio S.J. and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 565. 37 From “The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window,” Thomas Merton, 1944. Accessed online at “Thomas Merton’s Marian Poetry,”
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effected by the Spirit occurs.”42
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Mary is called the “aesthetic reality par excellence” in three ways: as “masterpiece” and “Dwelling Place” of Son and Spirit, and as “Seat of Wisdom”.43 Johann Roten notes that each of these symbolic expressions has a mediating character and points back to a divine origin. Mary’s beauty is always in reference to her Son’s: she “does not allow for aesthetic fixation on herself, but points to the Deus semper major and the Church semper reformanda for which she stands”.44 The aesthetic reality of Mary’s person, intertwined with that of her Son – expressed in the icon of the Madonna and Child – powerfully symbolizes and encapsulates the Christian message by stressing “the unbreakable unity and complementarity between God and humankind.”45 As Mother and Spouse of God, Mary’s beauty becomes linked with the Church, which shines the brighter, the closer it fulfills its mission in clinging to Christ and mediating His presence.
The Marian thread is woven throughout von Balthasar’s works on aesthetics, ecclesiology, and mission. In the Marian experience of God, von Balthasar finds a model for Christian response to God and a glorious example of the fruitfulness that comes from pure surrender to His will. Key to von Balthasar’s presentation of Mary is the way in which she is, in a real sense, at one with the Church. Mary as Church is both Virgin and Mother, the Bride of God who bears Christ to the world, the second Eve created from the wound in the side of the new Adam.46 Mary represents for von Balthasar that dimension of the Church which is highest and most closely conformed to Christ: “The Marian principle . . . is that dimension of the Church which continues and echoes Mary’s yes to God.”47 Mary’s spotlessness, “without wrinkle or stain,” is a model for the pure Church as it should be. As Bride, she co-operates with Christ in the event of redemption. She is also Mother, mirror, and memory of the Church, who embodies the Church, helps to bring it about, and explains its true purpose – to bear Christ to the world.48
42 Ibid., 113. 43 Ibid., 110-11. 44 Ibid., 111; 112. 45 Ibid.,114. 46 Von Balthasar, The Office of Peter and the Structure of the Church. Trans. Andrée Emery. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986): 183. 47 Leahy, Marian Profile, 9. 48 Ibid., 38.
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Balthasar stresses that Mary’s physical virginity is Christologically motivated, so that she can be Mother of the Son of God.49 Consenting as a virgin to God’s will reflects the purity of her faith and openness to God, as Brendan Leahy explains:
The garment of inner virginity is what is truly essential. In her nothingness and impossibility as virgin, she hands everything over to God, and also expects everything from him. Ultimately, this is the inner form of all Christian life. Mary’s bodily virginity expresses her faith, her total, active yes to God. . . . Her whole being, from the apex of her spirit to the depths of her unconscious self was a continuous yes to God.50
Balthasar uses the image of wax being imprinted by a seal to refer to Christ's work in us. While Christ's refashioning of the human being into his likeness is His own doing, according to Balthasar, the Christian attitude to the Christform must be one of loving receptivity to its impression. This is embodied in Mary's response to the Angel, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). Her “yes” allows the Holy Spirit into her life and her being in the most unimaginably fruitful of ways. Balthasar says that our imprinting by the Image “occurs the more impressively, in the literal sense, the less resistance the impress of the image encounters. Mary's Ecce Ancilla is the supreme instance . . . Allowing the Word its way in me is not an action, and is not, therefore, an accomplishment and a work; it is a contemplative obedience”.51 For Balthasar, seeing the form leaves an indelible imprint and has repercussions for future action, reorienting one's entire life: “The one who sees is enraptured and sent: beauty's existence means the beginning of a permanent change in the beholder”.52 The Christian vocation, of which Mary is the model, is to live in conformity with Christ so as to bear Him to the world. For the church to do so is for her to be “a real unfolding of Christ's presence, a melismatic extension (so to speak) of the theme he imparts, an epektasis toward the fullness of his form,” and this, despite the accompanying discord with which it is burdened in the present age.53
49 Balthasar and Ratzinger, Mary: Church at the Source, 106. 50 Leahy, Marian Profile, 78. 51 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 485f; quoted in Noel O’Donaghue, “A Theology of Beauty” in The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, ed. John Riches (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, Ltd., 1986), 1-10; 2. 52 Katherine LeNotre, “Flannery O'Connor's ‘Parker's Back’ and Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty and Tragedy,” Renascence 65, 5 (Fall 2013): 399-412; 403; referring to Balthasar, Glory of the Lord. 53 David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003), 339.
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Because of her relationship to the Son and as a signifier of the Church, Mary not only models the Christian vocation but is also an aesthetic reality worthy of contemplation. In her unique way, she enters into the mystery of God's beauty revealed and embodied in Christ. Paul VI names two ways to approach Mary: the way of truth, the via veritatis, “the way of the learned ones . . . who reach out to Mary in biblical, historical, and theological speculation”; and the way of beauty, the via pulchritudinis, “accessible to everybody, simple souls included”.54
O Tu Suavissima Virga: Hildegard of Bingen’s Musical Portrait of Mary
Mary is the first disciple, the first human being to receive and to love the Incarnate Word, and to know Him in a way more intimate than any other human being. Von Balthasar believes that the Church finds its true beginning in the humble scene of the Annunciation in Luke 1:26-38, with Mary’s Yes: “The Church began, not at Caesarea Phillipi or with the calling of the Twelve, but essentially in a chamber at Nazareth: with the consent of the virgin to become the mother of the Son of God and of his ‘brethren,’ the ‘rest of her offspring’ (Rev 12:17).”55 In Mary, humanity consents to the Incarnation.
The significance of this moment, as the very dawning of salvation, is contemplated and praised from mystical heights in the liturgical Marian chants of St. Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th-century mystic, abbess, theologian, and composer.56 In the responsory O tu suavissima virga (“O sweetest branch”) 57 and the hymn Ave Generosa (“Hail, nobly born”),58 Hildegard’s musical treatment of the Virgin Mother regards her as the meeting place of divine desire and human joy, the matrix of heavenly harmony. Her beauty and purity, illumined by God, become wondrous fecundity and fruitfulness.
54 Johann G. Roten, “Mary and the Way of Beauty,” Marian Studies: Vol. 49, Article 10 (1998): 109. 55 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life. Trans. Sr. Mary Frances McCarthy, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983): 210. 56 Hildegard’s musical output is compiled in the Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum. She composed both text and music. 57 I have consulted and drawn musical examples from Marianne Richert Pfau’s edition of the Symphonia (Bryn Mawr, Pensylvania: Hildegard Publishing Company, 1997). A recording by Sequentia and Barbara Thornton (with instrumental arrangement) from the album Canticles of Ecstasy, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, 1993, can be found here:
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Table 6: Text and translation of Hildegard’s O tu suavissima virga59 O tu suavissima virga O sweetest branch frondens de stirpe Iesse, budding from the stock of Jesse, o quam magna virtus est what a mighty work this is! quod divinitas God gazed in pulcherrimam filiam aspexit, on his fairest daughter sicut aquila in solem as an eagle oculum suum ponit: sets its eye upon the sun
R. Cum supernus Pater R. When the supernal Father claritatem Virginis adtendit saw the Virgin’s splendor ubi Verbum suum and wished his Word in ipsa incarnari voluit. to take flesh in her.
Nam in mistico misterio Dei, For in the mystical mystery of God, illustrata mente Virginis, the Virgin’s mind was illumined, mirabiliter clarus flos and a wondrously bright flower ex ipsa Virgine exivit: came forth from that Maid.
R. Cum supernus Pater… R. When the supernal Father…
Gloria Patri et Filio Glory to the Father and to the Son et Spiritui sancto, and to the Holy Spirit, sicut erat as it was in principio. in the beginning.
R. Cum supernus Pater… R. When the supernal Father…
Hildegard focuses on Mary’s pleasingness to God as the “highly favoured one” (Lk 1:28), the immaculate Virgin, chosen by God before time began in preparation for the bringing forth of the Son. The responsory adopts a cosmic perspective: the moment of the Annunciation, at which the Word became flesh, is understood as the defining moment of all of history, to which all creation looks with eager longing – all heaven and earth awaiting Mary’s fiat.60
Hildegard compares Mary to a branch (a play on the similarity of the Latin words virgo=virgin and virga=branch) that brings forth the “wondrously bright flower,” Jesus. The image is
59 The translation is by Barbara Newman in Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988): 132-3. 60 St. Bernard of Clairvaux presents this image in a homily; “On the Annunciation and Mary's ‘fiat,’” Hom. 4, 8-9: Opera omnia, Edit. Cisterc. 4 [1966], 53-54. From the Office of Readings for Dec. 20, Fourth Week of Advent.
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reminiscent of the vine and the branches of John 15:5. Christ in Mary’s case is both vine and fruit. Mary is also the branch sprouting from the tree of Jesse that allows God in Christ to be linked with human history in a concrete way. She is the link between the pure faith of Israel and the fruitfulness of the new covenant in Jesus: in Balthasar’s expression, Israel-Mary-Church.61 In this moment, the Old Testament trope of God’s miraculous bestowal of a child upon the childless (Sarah, Rebekah, Hannah, Elizabeth) is surpassed, so that it is His own Self He gives beyond all expectations.
Mary’s obedient surrender of her whole being brings ultimate fulfillment and fecundity, as a branch in full bloom. In this moment, Mary’s giving of her entire self makes space for God to bring the Redeemer into the world. Hers is a consent that can only be spoken out of an utmost purity and a bodily and spiritual readiness, manifested in her simplicity and virginity. Like the wise virgins in Matthew 25:1-13, she stands ready to greet the Bridegroom. Kept apart from sin by the Immaculate Conception, says Balthasar, Mary “stands outside the fallen world in an innocence like that of Adam and Eve before the fall.”62 Hence Hildegard names her God’s “fairest daughter.” Hildegard describes Mary in bridal terms, her beauty and purity irresistible to the Father in a way that echoes the Song of Songs: “[M]ost beautiful of women. . . How beautiful you are, my darling! Oh, how beautiful! Your eyes are doves.” (Sg 1:8;15). In “Ave Generosa,” Hildegard refers to Mary as the “candidum lilium” – the gleaming white, pure lily upon which the Father fixes His gaze before all creation. (This recalls the “lily among thorns” of Song of Songs 2:2.) In O tu suavissima virga, too, the Father gazes at Mary’s purity. The image of the eagle looking directly at the sun, usually a metaphor for the mystic’s experience of God, is inverted so that it is God who beholds the shining spotlessness of His handmaiden and desires His Word to take flesh in her. Her very smallness and simplicity is desirable and already splendid in the eyes of God. At the same time, it is the work of the Father that “illumines” her and allows her to blossom. Mary’s whole being (her womb together with her “mente,” meaning mind, consciousness, imagination) is illumined by this unprecedented overshadowing by the Spirit. Her creative powers are enlivened suffused with grace. Mary’s body receives the Word and physically bears Christ in her flesh. Her spirit magnifies the Lord. She is full of grace which
61 Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger [Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI], “Preface” in Mary: The Church at the Source. Trans. Adrian Walker. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005): 10. 62 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Christian State of Life. Trans. Sr. Mary Frances McCarthy, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1983), 201.
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spills over for all humanity.
Ave Generosa builds on these themes while broadening the focus of O tu suavissima virga, by adopting a multifaceted perspective of Mary as chosen Bride, Spouse, and Mother. In this rapturous hymn, Hildegard draws our attention to Mary’s maternal fruitfulness (as the Theotokos, or God-bearer), holding this image together with her reception of the Word in the intimacy of her own body. Hildegard’s favourite metaphors— nature imagery, spousal symbolism, and heavenly music—are all invoked. The “overshadowing” of Mary by the Spirit, by which God takes on flesh in her womb, is described using metaphors from the natural world: a flood of water (cf. the spring of water welling up to eternal life in John 4:14); fresh dew (suggesting morning); greening grass (evoking springtime); a white lily; the shining dawn. As in O tu suavissima virga, we hear of Mary’s beauty delighting God, and God setting His gaze upon her before time in choosing her to bear the Son. In a unique poetic image, this conceit is extended so that Mary herself becomes the very “pupil” in the eye of chastity (translated above as “piercing gaze”), who returns the gaze, beholding the bright splendour of God. Likewise, the warm embrace of God, in which Mary is enfolded when she conceives the Son, is mirrored by Mary’s warm embrace of the Son in her own arms, as she nurses Him at her breast. In this way, God receives delight, love, and nourishment from Mary. Hildegard does not hesitate to make reference to Mary’s physical body – she is named as the “material of holiness”; her flesh (“viscera”) and her womb (“venter”) rejoice. Finally, with increasing intensity, Hildegard turns to the language of music to express the jubilant union of heaven and earth that comes about as a result of her “yes.” This is a new, never- before-heard song: the full and all-encompassing harmony of the celestial realms rejoicing together with the Church on earth.
Table 7: Text and translation of Hildegard’s Ave Generosa63 1. Ave generosa gloriosa et intacta 1. Hail, nobly born, hail, honored and puella, tu pupilla castitatis, inviolate, you Maiden are the piercing gaze of tu materia sanctitatis, chastity, you the material of holiness— que Deo placuit. the one who pleasèd God.
2. Nam hec superna infusio in te fuit, 2. For heaven’s flood poured into you quod supernum Verbum in te carnem induit. as heaven’s Word was clothed in flesh in you.
63 Translation by Nathaniel M. Campbell. Latin collated from the transcription of Beverly Lomer and the edition of Barbara Newman. Accessed online at
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3. Tu candidum lilium 3. You are the lily, gleaming white, quod Deus ante omnem creaturam upon which God has fixed his gaze inspexit. before all else created.
4. O pulcherrima et dulcissima, 4. O beautiful, O sweet! quam valde Deus in te delectabatur, How deep is that delight that God received cum amplexionem caloris sui in you, when ‘round you he enwrapped his in te posuit, warm embrace, ita quod Filius eius de te so that his Son was suckled lactatus est. at your breast.
5. Venter enim tuus gaudium habuit 5. Your womb rejoiced as from you sounded cum omnis celestis symphonia forth the whole celestial symphony. de te sonuit, For as a virgin you have quia virgo Filium Dei portasti, borne the Son of God— ubi castitas tua in Deo claruit. in God your chastity shone bright.
6. Viscera tua gaudium habuerunt 6. Your flesh rejoiced just as a blade of grass sicut gramen super quod ros cadit on which the dew has fall’n, cum ei viriditatem infundit, viridity within it to infuse— ut et in te factum est, just so it happened unto you, O mater omnis gaudii. O mother of all joy!
7. Nunc omnis ecclesia in gaudio rutilet 7. So now in joy gleams all the Church ac in symphonia sonet like dawn, resounds in symphony propter dulcissimam Virginem because of you, the Virgin sweet et laudabilem Mariam, and worthy of all praise, Maria, Dei Genitricem. Amen. God’s mother. Amen.
As with all of her music, Hildegard composed and set the text in her incomparable style, to be sung in unison by herself and her sister nuns in the context of liturgical worship. The single melodic line, for women’s voices, expresses an essential purity and unity: many voices coming together as one voice, unaccompanied by any other countermelody. Alongside this, the rich complexity of the melody, with its complicated, elaborate melismas (strings of notes on one syllable) demonstrates the fecundity, illumination, and the depth of faith of the Virgin Mother. Hildegard uses longer and more elaborate melismas for key words, such as flos (“flower”) and Virgine (Virgin/Maid) in O tu suavissima virga (Figure 5.1).64
64 Figures 5.1 and 5.2 are excerpts of the score of from Hildegard, Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum, “O Tu Suavissima Virga.” Edited by Marianne Richert Pfau, published by Hildegard Publishing Company, 1997.
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Figure 5.1: Freedom and elaborateness of melody. Key words emphasized.
Hildegard especially draws attention to the Father’s desire that the Son be born of Mary in a way that sees Mary as God’s Bride. Psalm 45 comes to mind: “So shall the King greatly desire your beauty” (Ps 45:11). Musically, Hildegard emphasizes this in O tu suavissima virga by setting the word “voluit” (i.e. the Father’s wish or desire) with the longest melisma of all, and one that encompasses the highest note in the piece (see Figure 5.2).
Figure 5.2: Long melisma on voluit (desired).
Hildegard also uses the range of the human voice to expressive effect. When, in Ave Generosa, she introduces the theme of the celestial symphony sounding forth from Mary (in verse 5), the
Reprinted by permission of Carl Fischer, LLC o/b/o Theodore Presser Company, authorized representative of Hildegard Publishing Company.
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vocal line peaks on the highest note yet. Shortly thereafter, in the same verse, the same climax is reached again on “in Deo” – “in God (your chastity shone bright).” This musical parallel expresses a symbolic and theological parallel: Mary’s bringing the Saviour to birth is likened to the breaking forth of heavenly music; of dazzling light. (See Figure 5.3.)
Figure 5.3. Melodic high points and mirrored musical phrases on “symphonia” and “in Deo.”
Written for female voices, Hildegard normalizes a “feminine” way of relating to God through musical beauty, which does not, however, exclude masculine voices:65 one of tenderness and power, purity and ardour, dizzying heights and endless freshness and creativity. The striking freedom and expansiveness of Hildegard’s melodic line, dipping and weaving up and down, unencumbered by rhythmic regularity, imitates the exaltation and freedom of Mary’s spirit, rejoicing in the Magnificat in the fullness and blessedness it has received, and the new and expansive life in Christ. This is the freedom that comes with consenting to God’s will for one’s life; as Leahy puts it: “Mary is a paradigm of the freedom which is realized when we let God speak his word in our lives and give us a mission in the world.”66 Mary’s response, though humble, is not merely passive; rather, says Leahy, “It is a moment of maximum activity, a vibrant readiness of love, involving all her human powers and energies.”67 In this she is a model
65 Cf. Margot Fassler, “Music for the Love Feast: Hildegard of Bingen and the Song of Songs,” in Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology, ed. Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie (Michigan; Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), 355-381; 374. 66 Leahy, Marian Profile,70. 67 Ibid., 81.
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for the readiness of the Christian to respond to God’s call, and to the tremendous fecundity that results in assenting to it. The Virgin becomes the fruitful Spouse.
This much is clear: in drawing close to Mary, we draw close to Christ. “Mary’s form,” says von Balthasar, “as faithful image, reveals Christ’s form as sole archetype.”68 Mary stands for the individual Christian and the Church as a whole. She is the archetype of a Church that conforms to Christ, and shows that Christian sanctity is “Christophorous,” or “Christ-bearing.”69 Her life is “a pre-eminent example of a prayerful obedience, an existence wholly conformed to Christ, utterly directed to God and to the salvation of the world, perfectly receptive to, accepting of, and compliant with God’s will.”70 To the extent that the individual Christian becomes like her, says von Balthasar, “the Christian reality becomes just as simply legible and comprehensible in him [as in Mary].”71 Through humility, transparency, and expectant readiness, our lives, like Mary’s, become the “wet clay in which alone the Christ form can become impressed.”72
Balthasar distinguishes between the worship due to God alone and the veneration due to Mary, as a human being. Mary is to be praised not for herself alone, but because of the perfection with which she points to God, summed up in her beautiful and direct saying, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). Mary’s form, says von Balthasar, “is inundated in a light radiating from him.” Likewise, the Church should manifest God’s glory by remaining perfectly transparent to Him in the expectant readiness of Mary.
For von Balthasar, contemplating Mary’s life allows us to “contemplate the unfathomable mystery of engraced human co-operation with divinity.”73 The meaning of her image is “only to be read in relation to Christ.”74 Because Mary’s being is defined in relation to Christ, every element of her existence becomes for those who meditate on it a way in to deeper relationship with Him. This is what happens in praying the Rosary, whose cycles reflect the mysteries of the faith through Mary’s eyes: “What Christ is for her, what God is for her, becomes the primal and primary image of what he should be for us, and this takes place when in simplicity we try to look
68 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 563. 69 Ibid., 562. 70 Lucy Gardner, “Balthasar and the Figure of Mary” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes, David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 64-78; 65. 71 Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 562. 72 Ibid., 564. 73 Gardner, “Balthasar and the Figure of Mary,” 66. 74 Ibid., 76.
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through her at the mysteries of our redemption.”75
I would like to propose that music can offer a similar way of meditating on and entering into the mysteries of our faith. If, as we have sought to argue, the senses and the imagination are and should be involved and invigorated in the experience of God, then music, in appealing to and engaging us sensorially and imaginatively, stimulates this process. The power of music to do so makes it an important ally in the spiritual life, that can touch and rouse us on deep and hidden levels of the heart.
There is yet a deeper insight I would like to suggest: something that music shares with our creative contemplation of the figure of Mary. Balthasar presents a decidedly typological view of Mary, which understands her to be suspended in a kind of mediatory place. She is the woman between the Old and New Testaments (and thus between Israel and the birth of the Church), between the aeons (as the woman of Revelations 12 who sums up all the hopes of God’s people), between time and eternity (in her participation in heavenly glory). We can see a parallel with the way in which Balthasar views music, which he calls: “a borderland of the human . . . [where] the divine begins.”76 As Phillip McCosker describes: “Von Balthasar sees music as liminal, between that which can and cannot be spoken, between God and humanity, between Creator and creation. Music speaks ineffably of that which cannot be spoken, or even spoken of.”77 Furthermore, music too, like the image of the Virgin Mother, lies at the confluence of time and eternity: “With the passing of each note we sense the presence of the whole, which simultaneously comes into being in time and – in some incomprehensible supratemporal realm – always is.”78
Contemplation of music allows an opening of our spiritual perception, through our imaginations and our senses. Mary’s existence is a symphony of grace; in contemplating the Marian image, we are able to perceive the Christ-form. Music, like Mary, bears the beautiful into the world. In Ave Generosa, Hildegard links the sounding forth of “celestial symphony” with Mary’s bringing Jesus to birth. The music of the Church (for which Mary is herself a type) responds in joy with a
75 Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Mary for Today, trans. Robert Nowell (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 46. 76 Phillip McCosker, “Blessed Tension: Barth and Von Balthasar on the Music of Mozart,” in The Way: A Review of Christian Spirituality Published by the British Jesuits 44 (2005): 91, quoting von Balthasar in The Development of the Idea of Music. 77McCosker, “Blessed Tension,” 91, quoting von Balthasar, The Development of the Idea of Music. 78 McCosker, “Blessed Tension,” 91, quoting Balthasar in Theo-Drama: Volume I: Prolegomena. Trans. Graham Harrison. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 350.
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re-echoing symphony of its own. Given Hildegard’s highly sacramental view of music, it is not surprising that she equates musical praise with the presence of Christ.79
Making Connections: Music, Magnificat, and Ministry
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. (Luke 1:46-49) If we take Mary as our model for discipleship in the way of beauty, there is much to learn about the mission of the Christian in a general way, and the Christian musician in particular. Mary’s song of praise is a symbol of the full activation of her creative potential by the Word with whom she is now united. How noteworthy it is for us that Mary, having listened to and received the Word (and continuing to ponder it) in silence, is now moved to musical praise and prophetic testimony in song in the Magnificat (Luke 1). The image of Mary, pregnant with the indwelling Christ, giving voice to the Magnificat, provides us with a threefold model, for work we might engage in as disciples of Christ. It is a model:
1. For all sacred and liturgical music, and all Christian art and creativity;
2. For all prophetic witness and the ministry of theology; and
3. For all Christian ministry, charitable acts of service, work for justice and peace, and engagement with the world.
Contemplating Mary’s Magnificat as it emerges from her silent communion with Christ, we realize that all creative action for the building up of God’s kingdom must flow from Christ’s presence within us. Mary bursting into song symbolizes the ultimate flourishing to come when she brings the Son to birth, from her own flesh. Because the entirety of Mary’s person has accepted Christ, she is now able to magnify Him in mind, body, and spirit. First, the Magnificat is above all a song of praise, bursting forth from the radical experience of the joy of receiving
79 Cf. Christina Labriola, “Recalling the Original Harmony of Paradise: Hildegard of Bingen and the Nexus of Music, Ethics, and Spirituality,” in Music, Theology, and Justice. Michael O’Connor, Hyun Ah Kim, Christina Labriola, eds. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 163-180; 167-8.
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and welcoming the Saviour. In communion with the Source of all music, Mary sings her own variation on the Theme of the Word. The incorporation of the Magnificat into the liturgical life of the Church (at Vespers) signals that Mary’s song becomes ours; her response to God’s drawing near – a decidedly musical response – should be ours as well. Second, the Magnificat is prophetic in witnessing to the fulfilment of God’s promises already beginning to be fulfilled, and proclaiming the reversal of fortunes brought about according to God’s designs: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first; the proud shall be humbled, and the humble exalted. Rooted in the relationship of love, intimacy, and joy she enjoys with God, Mary sees clearly the hand of God in human history and is emboldened to magnify the holy and mighty One who has become vulnerable to her, entrusting her with the care of his very Self. For those who seek to witness to God’s immanent and saving presence bursting through the seams of creation, Mary’s song provides a template and emboldens them to sing aloud of the hidden mysteries they have encountered in the silence of contemplation. Third, the pattern of the Annunciation leading to the Visitation and Magnificat (and ultimately the Nativity) reflects the reality we have been tracing on a smaller scale in the Christian spiritual life. Mary’s quiet, receptive attentiveness and self- diminishment allows for a profound and intimate encounter with God, and finally gives way to an outward expression of the depths of what has been inwardly experienced. Likewise, our own quieting in prayer leaves the door open for the Lord to enter – and the result is externalized as ministry, witness, and evangelization of all types: the strengthening of our hands for compassionate service.
The common call to share in Mary’s mission to bear beauty into the world may mean different courses of action in different contexts. Being in relationship with the beautiful Christ means that the Christian does all things for the sake of Beauty itself, dedicating ones works, whether hidden or manifest, to the service of Beauty. This might entail heroic contributions to peacemaking and reconciliation through the healing of divisions, or quietly seeking to live simply, with integrity, as a person of the Beatitudes. All disciples must seek to make of their lives a work of art, in order to live lives beautified by virtue80 and expressive of different aspects of Christ’s own multifaceted, limitless, and omnipresent beauty. Living beautifully (or artfully) is always a collaborative effort with the Spirit – it is necessary to allow God in, to beautify and perfect us, to
80 Hildegard makes a powerful connection between music and virtue when she personifies the Virtues as musical beings in Ordo Virtutum. See Labriola, “Recalling the Original Harmony of Paradise.”
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use us as His instruments.
For Christian artists and musicians, the service of beauty is more pronounced. Performance and artmaking, which entail quiet preparation, sacrifice, and the flourishing of creativity, become means of attracting others to the beauty of Christ, and, as we have seen, the Christian artist or musician a conduit for God’s own message. Christian art can become a collaborative experience with the Great Artist, who gifts human beings with creative potential after His own image and likeness. Finally, the artist or musician, who receives her creative potential from God, in placing it at God’s disposal, results in being doubly blessed by the transformative process and power of the art- and music-making in which she participates.
The composer James MacMillan describes this dynamic:
The incarnation came about through Mary's free and rational acceptance of God's plan for her. Similarly an artist or a composer who thinks in real and meaningful terms of a divine inspiration would be mistaken in underestimating the full and active participation of all one's human faculties. It is a mistake to negate our human dimension and experience. It is through the interaction of all that makes us human—our intellect, our intelligence, our emotion and our physicality, our universal experience of joy and despair, our flesh and blood—with the breath of God which brings forth creative fruit (for an artist new work, new art, new music). Jesus himself was at once flesh of Mary and the Son of God.”81
In saying “yes” and “so be it” to God’s invitation, we place all that we have and all that we are into His hands. In receiving and in offering, our creative capacities are suffused with God’s beauty, energy, and light. Our works of loving service, and of art, break forth to magnify the divine.
81 James MacMillan, “God, Theology and Music.” New Blackfriars 81, 948 (February 2000): 16–26; 23.
Conclusion
“Music, embodiment, our emotive and affective life, and our faith belong together.”1 —Maeve Louise Heaney, VDMF
“Now the ears of my ears awake”: The Contemplative Encounter with Beauty in Music and Faith
In the article “Beauty, Beethoven’s Fifth, and the Experience of Faith,”2 Joan L. Roccasalvo, C.S.J. reminds us of the human need for beauty, a need deeply engrained within us. Beauty offers with it a sense of order, harmony and goodness; it attracts, draws one out of oneself, and causes one to be “overcome” by it; it is deeply satisfying and potentially transformative. As the “most tangible of the transcendentals,”3 beauty strikes our senses and intellects with immediacy, persuading us of the love-worthiness of that form which we affirm is beautiful. Beauty is an invitation to the whole person, “a stepping stone to contemplation.”4
Roccasalvo proposes that the aesthetic act, the encounter with beauty, serves as an analogy5 for the act of faith, the encounter with God. She follows a five-step outline, derived from Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord, and makes reference to the musical beauty of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, though any worthy piece of music may be substituted. As we follow this outline by way of summary, let us consider another musical example of a much smaller scale than the great fifth Symphony: a choral piece by contemporary American composer Eric Whitacre (b. 1970). i thank You God for most this amazing day is a setting of e.e. cumming’s poem.6 A piece at once luminous, contemplative, and ecstatic, it uses lush harmonies and textures to give voice to a text that breathes and sings with the magnificence of being human, drinking in life with all of the senses: i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
1 Maeve Louise Heaney, Music as Theology: What Music Says about the Word (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 299. 2 Joan L. Roccasalvo, “Beauty, Beethoven’s Fifth, and the Experience of Faith,” Irish Theological Quarterly 73 (2008): 374. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 371. 5 Joan L. Roccasalvo intends, as she clarifies (footnote 32, p. 378) and as I do in following her, to mark the similarities of activity while keeping the difference in essence firmly in mind. 6 A recording by the Stanford Chamber Chorale and Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, directed by Stephen Layton, can be found here:
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and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any—lifted from the no of all nothing—human merely being doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)7
The poem’s speaker takes a contemplative attitude to life and the world around him, all senses awakened and heightened by an encounter with the Real that underlies the myriad beauties of existence. It is an ecstatic response to the wonder of being alive, of feeling oneself in the presence of God and part of the intricate, living tapestry of creation – a sacramental, incarnational world.
As we work our way through the five-step outline, we will consider the parallels between the act of listening to a piece of music and perceiving its beauty (in this case, Whitacre’s i thank you God), and listening to and perceiving the beauty of the Word in the contemplative act of faith, together with the resulting transformative union.
1. Revelation of the Form First, the form presents itself to us, drawing our attention and focus. As i thank you God begins, sound breaks upon the surrounding silence like dawn upon the darkness. The opening phrase immediately beckons us and takes us up with it as it unfolds: beginning with three simple, soft, repeated, homophonic major chords (“i thank you”), the music gives way to a more complex sonority on the word “God,” and, pausing for a moment, gains momentum with a crescendo and climbs up to a soaring fortissimo climax on “amazing” that spreads and expands outwards to “day.” Within 7 bars of music, the attentive listener is grasped by the form that reveals itself “to
7 “i thank You God for most this amazing” from XAIPE (1950). Taken from the liner notes of Eric Whitacre, Cloudburst and other choral works. Polyphony, Stephen Layton, Hyperion CDA67543, 2006.
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the ear and to the entire person” and must be “actively receptive”8 to what follows (see Fig. 6.1).9
Figure 6.1: The first 7 measures of i thank you God.
8 Roccasalvo, “Beauty, Beethoven’s Fifth, and the Experience of Faith,” 375. 9 Score excerpts from Eric Whitacre, i thank you God for most this amazing day. Revised edition published by Walton Music, 2009. Reprinted by permission.
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In the composition process, as Balthasar observes, the element of inspiration must be at work in the artist (composer), so that the piece he creates is not entirely his own: “In the last analysis, the inspired artist does not follow his own idea, but rather allows something ungraspable to cast its rays upon him.”10 In the act of composition, the composer’s mind and the musical ideas therein are illuminated. As received by the listener (“beholder”), the music possesses a rightness: it had to be this musical phrase, this combination of sounds, dynamics, and intervals, and no other, imagined or projected by the composer while the piece was still “gestating,” that could open the piece. The integrity of the form as a whole depends on it.
In the act of faith, the revelation that attracts, invites and enraptures our whole being is Jesus Christ. God enters into the human condition by becoming human in Jesus Christ, the perfect form of God. Christ is the form of the God-Man who reveals Himself to the eyes of faith. The gospels tell us that in his earthly life and public ministry, Jesus attracted followers to Himself who saw God manifested in Him. Bridging the chasm between the human and divine, God breaks upon the world11 in a radically new way in Christ, the “New Song,” drawing and fixing the gaze (or perhaps, for our purposes, the attentive ear) of our heart.
2. Light and Power Expressed by the Form When the listener enters into i thank You God, she discovers a surplus of meaning welling up from within it. She is seized by the “vigor, certitude, clarity, and intelligibility . . . light and majestic power” held therein.12 The piece is brief (only around 6 minutes in length) and self- contained, a mere fragment of all the music, or beauty, for that matter, that exists in the world, yet there is a sense in which it opens out onto a limitless horizon, revealing while concealing the infinite depth it holds. Towards the end of the piece, Whitacre creates a blossoming effect on the word “opened,” layering note upon note to form a sustained, upward-moving cluster of tones that seems to imitate a window opening out onto a new vista. (See Figure 6.2.) With a truly great work of art, the more one enters in, the more one senses layer upon layer of meaning and worth, beyond even the scope of the composer’s original intent. The soundscape created by Whitacre in i thank You God, taking the poem’s imaginative use of language as a starting point, is effused
10 Roccasalvo, “Beauty,” quoting Balthasar, Seeing the Form, 220-221, 251. 11 “In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon us,” sings the Church in the Benedictus (Luke 1:68-79). 12 Roccasalvo, “Beauty,” 375.
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with the light, lightness, and joy of being alive, and the “unimaginable” grandeur and vastness of the Creator’s sustaining love.
Figure 6.2: Ascending blossoming effect on “opened” toward the end of the piece (m. 84-85).
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Likewise, in Jesus the Man-God (and in the Eucharist), God is both concealed and made manifest. “Though [Jesus’s] Godhead is concealed, it reveals itself as God’s glory, definitive, and radiant. Glory is God’s love and holiness. . . . As the mission of Jesus unfolded, his holiness shone with unique loveliness.”13 Christ is “the light shining in the darkness,”14 through whom God’s beauty shines most perfectly. In the act of faith, we surrender ourselves to the Christ, drawn ever more deeply into the vast mystery of God’s love, made known through Him.
As a complementary way of thinking about the expressive light and power of the beautiful form as an analogue to the dynamic of faith, we can also bring to bear American Catholic theologian David Tracy’s language of “the event-character of truth” to be found in artistic experiences.15 In speaking about the shocking, transformative moment of “paradigmatic recognition”16 that comes about in the authentic experience of art, Tracy refers to “the truth-character of the experience of art as a realized experience of the essential.”17
Tracy points to what he articulates as the “excess of meaning” in a classic work.18 All authentic understanding thus becomes a hermeneutical event, in which a disclosure of truth is made known to us.19 The subject must be willing to risk letting go of self-consciousness and subjectivity, to allow the “event-character of truth itself” contained in the work to break upon us. When we approach a classic work with this contemplative, unselfconscious honesty, “We find ourselves ‘caught up’ in its world, and we are shocked, surprised, challenged by its startling beauty and its recognizable truth, its instinct for the essential.”20 Because of this shocking moment of recognizing “that which endures”21 encapsulated within the work, the experience of a work of art becomes “a realized experience of an event of truth.”22 The artistic (or musical) experience surpasses itself in becoming the means by which we are “caught up in a disclosure of the event-
13 Roccasalvo, “Beauty,” 379. 14 C.f. the first chapter of John’s Gospel. 15 David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (London: SCM, 1981), 114. 16 Ibid., 113. 17 Ibid., 115; emphasis added. 18 Ibid., 104. 19 Ibid., 107. 20 Ibid.,110. 21 Ibid., 108. 22 Ibid., 111.
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character of truth itself”.23
3. Readiness and Need for Guidance Though one may (or may not) be initially attracted to Eric Whitacre’s i thank You God, in order to enjoy it more fully, and recognize its beauty, guidance is needed. For, as Roccasalvo says, though natural beauty can be directly intuited (which the speaker of the poem certainly seems to corroborate), when it comes to artistic beauty, a certain predisposition and openness is needed. The “added tone sonorities” Whitacre is fond of using (designed to “shimmer”) may sound unpleasant and dissonant to an inexperienced listener, while their complexity may sound rich, resonant, and pleasing to another with a more sensitive and well-trained ear. This is because beauty “is grasped according to the manner proportionate to one’s power of imagination and experience.”24 The difference in reaction to an added tone chord—such as at the one onto which “day” resolves in the opening phrase, or the fluttering, delicate, repeated cluster chords on “wings” (see Figure 6.3) — is not strictly a matter of taste, but of preexisting bias and disposition in the listener. Whereas one may hear it as disconcertingly unusual, another finds it unusually wonderful.
Figure 6.3: Cluster chord (C-D-E-F-G sounding together) on “wings” (m. 47).
Roccasalvo disagrees with the contention that taste is subjective, arguing that objective standards of quality do exist, and refers instead to the appetitive sense of the word taste, where, as with delicious food, the goal is enjoyment and union.25 A wise guide can help the listener remove the barriers or biases that block his enjoyment of the piece of music, pointing out the artistry, craftsmanship and finesse of the piece, the finer points of the work (such as the way Whitacre
23 Ibid., 114. 24 Roccasalvo, “Beauty,” 376. 25 Ibid.
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uses complex harmonies or word painting in evocative ways). In this way, (like the speaker in the poem — “now the ears of my ears awake and / now the eyes of my eyes are opened”) the listener can experience an awakening of the ear and the intellect so that he can become ready and open to recognize and grasp the beauty of the piece.
Roccasalvo relates the need for guidance to recognize beauty after the initial encounter with the form to the ways in which the Church serves as a guide to foster conversion, inspire a person to embrace the faith, and promote the deepening of a relationship with Christ. In the Roman Catholic context, the RCIA program, and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, are examples.26 A mentor, role model, spiritual director, nurturing community, and the liturgy itself can serve as guides towards the beauty of Christ.
4. Experiential Knowledge and Perception At this stage, the beholder (listener, contemplative) “moves away from self and forgets self to go out to beauty.”27 This is the heart of the encounter, where perception takes place and the beholder is overtaken. Forgetting the self, one allows “being to be itself” and so perceives the beauty it offers. In stopping and taking a long, loving look at the form, one allows “the beauty to shine through it, contemplating it, grasping it, and being grasped by it.”28
Applying this to Whitacre’s choral piece, the soaring first soprano line coupled with the undulating melisma of the soprano and alto voices on “infinite” (Figure 6.4a) and “unimaginable You?” (Figure 6.4b) might cause the listener to feel that time stands still, and that the music is giving voice to his own inner feeling of peace, gratitude, transcendence, and awe. It might be these specific moments, others, or the duration of the piece as a whole, when the receptive listener feels so profoundly and emotionally caught up with the music, that she identifies herself with the music and the music with herself (“You are the music while the music lasts.”)29
In the realm of the contemplative experience of faith, this is the moment of losing oneself in Christ; being totally overshadowed, like the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, with the beauty of God. Bathed in the beauteous light of the form of Christ, we are, as the Christmas preface
26 Ibid., 381. 27 Ibid., 377. 28 Ibid., 377-8. 29 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (“The Dry Salvages,” 1941).
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expresses it, “caught up in the love of the God we cannot see.”30 The senses are not disengaged from this act of faith; rather, through the Incarnation, they are embraced and swept up into the dynamic, so that as embodied beings, we encounter God by means of the flesh, where God meets us in Christ.
Figure 6.4a: Soprano solo and undulating chords below it (m. 19-23) express transcendence and expansiveness.
30 From The Sacramentary, trans. International Commission on English in the Liturgy (New York: Catholic Book Publishing, 1985), 379; quoted by Roccasalvo, “Beauty,” 383.
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Figure 6.4b: A similar moment on “unimaginable You,” (m. 71-75) addressing God. Here is it a question, opening out to infinity.
5. Deep Satisfaction and Transforming Union The experience of listening to a beautiful piece of music is deeply pleasing, satisfying, and lasting, remaining with us in the imagination and memory. It is an experience of love, an experience to which we long to return once it is at an end.31 It is potentially transformative,
31 Roccasalvo, “Beauty,” 378.
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capable of purifying our vision, and inspiring us to live better by reminding us of a spiritual reality in the midst of quotidian life. Our spiritual perception is refreshed; as the poet says, “now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened”. If i thank You God for most this amazing day has done its work in successfully mediating beauty (and if the listener has been receptive), he will relish the experience, be richer for it, and seek future experiences of musical beauty like it.
In the experience of faith, the transformation that comes about as a result of the perception of Christ’s beauty is the divinization of the human race in the great exchange effected by the Incarnation. Using the image of a viol string being attuned to the precise pitch whereby it can respond to its master’s touch and sing beautifully, Joan L. Roccasalvo calls this transformation our attunement (“at-one-ment”) to Christ, the consummation of our existence.32 The fullness of contemplation is the beatific vision to come.
The irresistible call of beauty in the revelation of the form establishes a focused mode of attentive wonder as it impacts upon our senses. Moving deeper, we begin to grasp the light and power expressed by the form as we are ever more enthralled and absorbed by it. Moving out of ourselves, we give over to the beautiful form and in a sense unite with it. We leave the experience having derived great worth and meaning, even to the point of being transformed, bearing a “beauty mark” left behind on us. What remains for us to do is to seek to share this experience with others: to bear witness to its transformative power.
As we draw to a close, let us recall Viladesau’s three interconnected ways that music leads us to the sacred, set out in the introduction to this work.33 All are bolstered and upheld by beauty. The first, that music serves to exalt sacred words and action, is the province of the liturgist and minister of music. The second, that music can evoke religious sentiments, has been touched upon in our consideration of the parallel between the contemplative experience of beauty in music and that of faith. The third, the manifestation of beauty as a way to the sacred in music, has been our main concern, and it is this – the ushering of beauty into the world through music’s sacramental appeal to human bodiliness and spirituality – that gives the other ways their viability. As
32 Ibid., 384. 33 Richard Viladesau, Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art and Rhetoric (New York; Mahwah, N.J,: Paulist Press, 2000), 43.
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Viladesau declares: “the ultimate reason for music’s ability to mediate the spiritual is not merely that it echoes emotions that are felt in religious experience, but also more profoundly that its object is the beautiful, which itself is godly and thus leads toward God.”34 That is, as this undertaking has sought to establish: musical experiences can indeed be, in themselves, sacred experiences charged with divine presence.
Confessing the reality of God’s “sacramental” presence in the world through beauty allows us to grant a place for musical experiences as potentially revelatory of God. This is so through the dynamic of sacramentality, a dynamic that allows for God’s presence to shine through material creation by way of drawing us closer to Him. This dynamic, present in music, appeals to the whole person (heart, soul, mind, body) and in so doing, brings together the intellectual life with the emotional life and the life of the spirit. Contemplation (a silent, attentive listening, which music helps to engender) enables us access to that beauty that is coextensive with life itself. Nourished by such an encounter, the final movement is outward, to the world: a resulting creative fruitfulness that goes to the heart of the call of the Christian, remaining united to Christ the vine, to “go and bear fruit—fruit that will last.”
Implications and Possibilities for Future Research “Let anyone with ears listen!” – Mt. 11:15
This thesis has set out to provide a foundation, based in the Catholic spiritual and theological tradition, for granting music a place within Christian spirituality as it is lived and practiced in the body, mind, and spirit. Using the language of sacramentality has allowed us to conceive of music, with all of its bodily and affective resonances, as fitting into the framework of sacrament, understood in its most essential sense as a bestowal of God’s grace through the symbolic mediation of the material world. This has led us to consider the Incarnation of the Word as the foundation of our discussion, by way of securing a place for the body and senses in the radical new way of knowing God brought about by Jesus. I have shown that the beauty of music is by no means merely transitory or inconsequential, but in reality is related to and reflects the beauty of God and of Being itself. In training us to listen with humility, receptivity, and patience, music can ready us for contemplation, that interior silence in which we listen to God’s voice. This
34 Viladesau, Theology and the Arts, 41, emphasis added.
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contemplative disposition of the heart led us to reflect on the Virgin Mary, who stands as a prime model of the Christian discipleship and shows us how to accept and respond to the invitation of God, who desires to be in relation with us, and to work in and through our creative capacities, to bring about fruitfulness in us, that the kingdom may come.
I have shown music to be valuable to the life of faith in the unique and profound ways that it engages the human body and sense of hearing, the imagination, the emotions, and the heart, as well as the intellect. Inasmuch as music can engage, focus, and direct these human faculties towards an encounter with God, it can be said to have a place in the revelatory dynamic of God’s self-disclosure in love. That God makes Himself known and bestows grace to human beings through music is yet another way in which God reveals His heart of mercy: His unceasing generosity, condescension, and desire to draw us to Himself. As such, this work provides a reinforcement of holistic and experiential ways of relating to God through the imagination, the arts, and an engagement through the senses with the world around us. This is an important counterbalance to over-intellectualization and a tendency towards disembodiment with regard to the spiritual life. This approach also provides an alternative to word-focused styles of prayer, by incorporating music-making and music-listening into the dynamic of contemplation. As such, I have sought to provide a rationale for music as an aid to prayer and even possibly as an occasion of prayer in and of itself. Further, in developing a sensitivity to beauty and contemplation, music might be spiritually formative, imparting the value and the possibility of relating to God through sense and spirit together, while providing occasions for lived experiences of the same. While these benefits might hold for all those who enjoy music and who regularly and consciously place it within the context of the spiritual life, in a real sense, musicians themselves are in a privileged position: experiencing the music “from within,” they enjoy a closer bond, deeper understanding, and visceral connection to what music offers.
I have shown that music (like, we might argue, all art) is always necessarily an embodied, lived phenomenon, taking place in a specific time and place, among specific human participants. As such, I have sought to provide a reinforcement of music’s pastoral use through theology. When those who compose, sing, and play music do so with a spirit of offering, they are doubly blessed: they receive the twin graces of participating in God’s bestowal of gift and the effects of that gift at once. Singing is praying twice, as goes the famous axiom attributed to St. Augustine. This
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sacramental dynamic of reception—offering—return gift provides for liturgical musicians, who place their talents at the service of the Church in a direct way, much encouragement, and a way of understanding their ministry in a profound theological manner.
This dynamic is not confined to sacred music alone, but extends to all those who place their musical gifts in God’s hands and cooperate with God to “bear beauty into the world.” That human beings are graced with the privileged opportunity to collaborate with God in His creative plan for the world is a mysterious reality. Human life and experience, human faculties and abilities, human creativity and capacities— these are shown to be valued by God and incorporated into the way God desires to relate to us and through us, to the world. The gift of music is one important way that these human capacities can be cleansed and converted, so as to become ready conduits of the beauty and goodness that God desires to impart to all creation.
One constraint of such a study is its limited scope with regard to musical examples. While I have selected pieces I deemed to be most especially worthy of consideration (and helpfully illustrative, based on our thematic approach), there were many worthy pieces that could have been held up as examples, and further research is called for to examine the unique spiritual resonances of these and so many other musical works. Though it must be admitted that not all music is “created equal,” and so a given piece of music will exemplify the qualities I have examined (and so mediate the sacred) to a greater or lesser extent, my aim has been to provide a theological basis for music in a general sense as being of value to the spiritual life. In so doing, I have attempted to raise up the universal qualities of music at a basic level—an engagement with the body, an affective dimension, a symbolic or mediatory function – and incorporate these into a Christian understanding of how humanity relates to God (and vice versa).
Human musical creativity is as rich and as diverse as humanity itself. A further constraint is this study’s inability to address the immense diversity of musical genres, styles, forms, and functions the world over. In choosing to attend to Western classical music (and expressly vocal), I have made a necessary choice, one that reflects the arena in which I live and move as a trained classical musician and choral practitioner, and is necessitated by the limitations of such a study. This choice does not reflect a value judgement; on the contrary, I feel that much fruitful research awaits that would apply the ideas I have posited to music of other genres: opera and musical theatre, folk, jazz, R&B, hip hop, rock and pop, and world musics of every sort, sacred and
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secular alike, together with the religiously resonant self-understandings, overt or implied, of artists of many genres.35 I am confident that music from a variety of styles would add unique shades of meaning to my argument, particular to the culture, tradition, and worldview out of which they spring.
This study is rooted in the Christian tradition. I am, however, well aware that other religious traditions have sophisticated and well-developed views of music and of sound in relation to faith and spiritual practice, ideas to which Christian scholarship in music and spirituality might advantageously attend. The mystical qualities of sound and music are attested to cross- traditionally. Further study, in dialogue with Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other religions’ views of the place of music in the spiritual life, holds much promise, at the intersection of comparative religion/mysticism and ethnomusicology.
Finally, while my focus has been music, and my primary metaphor has dealt with listening (to the Word in prayer) and responding in song (as modelled in the Magnificat), I recognize that much I have explored, with regard to sacramentality, Incarnation, beauty, contemplation, and fruitfulness, might well be applied to music’s sister arts. Unique testimony from the world of dance, theatre, poetry, literature, visual art, and architecture, would support the witness of music, and provide further depth and richness to our understanding of the marvellous human-divine exchange that extends through all time and space.
The sacramental potential of music reveals that musical experiences can be revelatory of God, in an embodied, sensuously-engaging manner. Initiated by God as gift, sacramental musical experiences foster a humble receptiveness to the transforming beauty they bestow, and invite in response the generous self-offering in love of a life lived “musically,” magnifying the Lord.
35 “I believe that all art has as its ultimate goal the union between the material and the spiritual, the human and the divine. And I believe that is the very reason for the existence of art and what I do. . . . I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. . . . [The] breath of life to me is the music of life and it permeates every fiber of creation. . . . The same music governs the rhythm of the seasons, the pulse of our heartbeats, the migration of birds, the ebb and flow of ocean tides, the cycles of growth, evolution and dissolution. It’s music, it’s rhythm. And my goal in life is to give to the world what I was lucky to receive: the ecstasy of divine union through my music and my dance. It’s . . . my purpose, it’s what I’m here for.” Michael Jackson, interviewed in Ebony, Vol. XLVII, No. 7 (May 1992): 40
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Appendix
Musical Selections with Links to Recordings for Listening
1. Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet no. 15, Op. 132, 3rd movement (“Heiliger Dankgesang”) • Alban Berg quartet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vTSpfWbSGs
2. Béla Bartók, Piano Concerto No. 3, 2nd Movement: Andante Religioso • Pianist Andras Schiff, Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, directed by Sir Simon Rattle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDzbhhFHj2c
3. James MacMillan, Seven Last Words from the Cross, Cantata for chorus and strings, III. Verily I say unto you, today thou shalt be with me in paradise • The Dmitri Ensemble, Graham Ross, from the album James MacMillan: Seven Last Words from the Cross, Naxos, 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=et8B79uR2Pk&t=12m00s (N.B. 12:00 to 20:12)
4. Olivier Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du temps, VIII. Louange à l'immortalité de Jésus • Violinist Alexander Nantschev, pianist Dino Sequi : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82AT62o838Y
5. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Great Mass in C Minor, K. 427, I. Kyrie • Barbara Bonney, soprano, Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvvk7ZG1IZw (N.B. 0:00 to 6:56)
6. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Great Mass in C Minor, K. 427, X. Et incarnatus est • Barbara Bonney, soprano, Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvvk7ZG1IZw&t=35m30s (N.B. 35:30 to 43:35)
7. Ēriks Ešenvalds: Passion and Resurrection, Part IV • Kristīne Gailīte, soprano, State Choir Latvija, Symphony orchestra of Liepāja, conducted by Māris Sirmais; from the album Ēriks Ešenvalds: Passion and Resurrection/Rihards Dubra: Te Deum, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55rL0HjVIMo&t=04m45s (N.B. 4:45 to 7:45)
8. Ēriks Ešenvalds: O Salutaris Hostia • Trinity College Choir, Cambridge, directed by Stephen Layton, from the album Ešenvalds: Northern Lights Hyperion, 2015.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blUTC7zzzRI
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9. Johann Sebastian Bach: Matthäus-Passion, BWV 244, Aria: Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben • Soprano Dorothee Mields, Cologne Philharmonie and Collegium Vocale, conducted by Philippe Herreweghe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkFAh6aE2QU
10. Arvo Pärt: The Beatitudes • Elora Festival Singers conducted by Noel Edison, from the album Arvo Pärt: Berliner Messe, Naxos, 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su4gGRcfKSk
11. Hildegard of Bingen: O Tu Suavissima Virga • Sequentia, Barbara Thornton (with instrumental arrangement) from the album Canticles of Ecstasy, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, 1993: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKSEmECQMfs
12. Hildegard of Bingen: Ave Generosa • Performers unknown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fRN7Czrs8Q
13. Eric Whitacre: i thank you God for most this amazing day • Stanford Chamber Chorale and Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, directed by Stephen Layton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMbSY7b0fuM
Copyright Acknowledgements
Excerpts from Beethoven, String Quartet no. 15, Op. 132, 3rd movement. Edited by John Morris, published by Gutenberg.org. Retrieved from imslp.org. IMSLP #01728. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Excerpts from Bartók, Piano Concerto No. 3, 2nd movement. Published by Boosey and Hawkes, 1947. Retrieved from imslp.org. IMSLP #442046. Public Domain. Excerpts from Seven Last Words from the Cross (3rd movement) by James MacMillan. © Copyright 2003 by Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers, Ltd. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission for the exclusive use of Christina Labriola, 2018.
Excerpts from Quatuor pour la fin du temps (8th movement). Music by Olivier Messiaen. Copyright © 1942 by Editions Durand - Paris, France. All rights reserved. Reproduced by kind permission of Hal Leonard MGB S.r.l. – Italy. Excerpts from Mozart, Great Mass in C Minor, “Kyrie.” Copyright Philip Legge. Retrieved from imslp.org. IMSLP #28540. Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives 3.0. Excerpts from Mozart, Grosse Messe, C Moll, “Et incarnatus est.” Arranged by G.A. Schmitt, published by Breitkopf und Hartel, 1901. Public Domain. Excerpts from Ēriks Ešenvalds, Passion and Resurrection, Part IV. Published by Musica Baltica, 2007. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from Ēriks Ešenvalds, O Salutaris Hostia. Published by Musica Baltica, 2009. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from J.S. Bach, Matthäus-Passion. Edited by Alfred Dürr, published by Bärenreiter Verlag, 1972. Retrieved from imslp.org. IMSLP #478796-478797. Public Domain. Excerpts from Arvo Pärt, The Beatitudes. Arvo Pärt, “The Beatitudes für gemischten Chor (SATB) und Orgel.” © Copyright 1990 by Universal Edition A.G., Wien/UE 33002. Reprinted by permission. Excerpts from Hildegard, Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum, “O Tu Suavissima Virga.” Edited by Marianne Richert Pfau, published by Hildegard Publishing Company, 1997. Reprinted by permission of Carl Fischer, LLC o/b/o Theodore Presser Company, authorized representative of Hildegard Publishing Company. Excerpts from Hildegard, Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum, “Ave Generosa.” Transcribed by Beverly Lomer for the International Hildegard Society. Retrieved at hildegard- society.org. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Excerpts from Eric Whitacre, i thank you God for most this amazing day. Revised edition published by Walton Music, 2009. Reprinted by permission.
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