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The pope, the musicians and the
Jews
By Spengler
A
Jewish joke from the 1930's tells of the old Jew
who is confronted by storm troopers: "Tell us, Jew
- who started the Great War?" The Jew, being no
fool, says, "The Jews," but adds, "as well as the
musicians."
"Why the musicians?," ask the storm
troopers. The Jew asks, "Why the Jews?"
In
the case
of Pope Benedict XVI, the question "Why the musicians?"
has the same answer as "Why the Jews?"
Jewish scripture and classical music are the
new pope's lifelong preoccupations. In order to
raise the Catholic Church up out of the ruins of
European secularism, Benedict looks backward to
the biblical background of Christianity as well as
to the high culture of the Christian West. In this
respect, he may be one of the most innovative popes
in history, for he must break with ancient church
tradition to do this. Benedict is one of the most
cultivated men alive, with a mind that no
surviving school could have trained. The trouble
is that little is left in Europe, either of high
culture or of the Jews. Perhaps he sees his
mission under the sign of St Benedict, as a
preserver in a dark age.
The
former cardinal
Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, devoted his life
to refuting Hobbes' jeer that the pope is "no
other than the ghost of the deceased Roman
Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof" [1].
Until a new barbarian invasion in the form of
Hitler's hordes held Pius XII captive in the Vatican,
the Roman Catholic Church refused to concede its right
to temporal authority. As young churchmen,
Karol Wojtyla and Ratzinger assisted in Rome's
renunciation of worldly power at the Second
Vatican Council, exorcising at last the ghost of
Caesar.
Other ghosts continue to haunt the
house of St Peter, though, and their presence
peers out of Benedict's writings. The heathen
pantheon bedeviled the dreams of the German-Jewish
poet Heinrich Heine, who reported a visitation
thus:
They might be the gods of an ancient
race
Of barbarians, wouldn't you know
it?
They prefer to make their romping
place
In the skull of a dying German poet
[2]. Pagan gods haunted Catholic
Europe for most of its two millennia, enduring
under the Christian veneer as assimilated saints,
or in the folk-religion of the people. Germany
never quite converted to Christianity, Heine
observed [3]. After the ruin and depopulation of
Rome, the Church created Europe by converting wave
after wave of barbarian invaders. But the
syncretic absorption of the pagan religions
brought forth the cancer that ultimately devoured
Europe in the two world wars of the last century
(see Why Europe
Chooses Extinction, April 8, 2003).
The last wilde Jagd (wild hunt) of
the Second World War extinguished the ghosts of
the heathen gods, but two kinds of ghosts still
haunt Benedict XVI. The first is Europe's dead
Jews, and the second is Europe's dead musicians,
most prominent among them Mozart. The Catholic
Church exiled both of them. The Jews it expelled
or drove to the frontier, which is why there were
3 million Jews speaking a Germanic dialect in
Poland at the outset of World War II. For similar
reasons, it proscribed the musicians, including
Mozart, whose religious music it put on the index
of prohibited works. No Mozart work had been heard
at the Vatican until 1985, when cardinal Ratzinger
invited Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin
Philharmonic to perform the Coronation Mass.
The juxtaposition of musicians and Jews may
seem fortuitous, but it is not. Despite heroic and
well-intended labors stretching over half a century,
the Catholic Church cannot come to terms with
the Jewish side of Christianity, not, at least,
in the way that American evangelicals do. As
a theologian and exegete of the Bible, Benedict XVI
believes that the Christian promise to the gentiles
merely extends God's promise to the Jews, and
he has expounded this view in numerous speeches
and articles [4]. But that promise has small
credibility if no living Jews are present to
receive it. Few Jews remain in Europe outside of
the half million in France, a community whose
future status may be incompatible with the
accommodation of 10 million Arab immigrants [5].
If the Vatican addressed large communities of
observant Jews in Poland, for example, its message
would resonate with the heavens. The nearest large
population of Jews, however, is to be found in
Israel, and therein lies a problem.
For a
Catholic theologian, dependence on biblical
exegesis rather than church tradition amounts to a
revolutionary innovation. Benedict XVI broke with
hoary church tradition when he argued (for
example) that in the Epistles of Paul "the
covenant with the Patriarchs is regarded as
eternally in force" [6]. Scripture is not quite
enough, however. American evangelicals of the past
generation look not only to the promises of
scripture, but also to the fact of Jewish
continuity over more than three millennia. As the
Reverend Pat Robertson observes, this makes credible
God's promise to Abraham in the Hebrew scriptures.
If God kept his promise to Abraham's seed, the
argument continues, so well he may to Christians
who enter into God's covenant through the
crucifixion. If the Jewish people were to
disappear, the Christian promise of salvation
would die with it.
The German-Jewish
theologian Franz Rosenzweig put it this way:
The Old Testament ... is more than a
mere book. Had the Jews of the Old Testament
disappeared from the earth like Christ, they
would now denote the idea of the People, and
Zion the idea of the Center of the World, just
as Christ denotes the idea of Man. But the
stalwart, undeniable vitality of the Jewish
people, attested in the very hatred of the Jews,
resists such "idealizing". Whether Christ is
more than idea - no Christian can know it. But
that Israel is more than idea, that he knows,
that he sees. For we live. We are eternal, not
as an idea may be eternal: if we are eternal, it
is in full reality. For the Christian we are
thus the really indubitable. The pastor who was
asked for the proof of Christianity by Frederick
the Great argued conclusively when he answered:
"Your majesty, the Jews!" The Christians can
have no doubts about us. Our existence stands
surety for their truth [7]. Even more
convincing for American evangelicals is Michael
Wyschogrod's contention that God's love for all
peoples begins with his particular love for the
Jews. As the Methodist theologian R Kendall Soulen
writes, "By allowing room for God's freedom to
fall in love with Abraham, the gentiles gain a
heavenly Father who is also concretely concerned
with them, and not just with humanity in the
abstract" [8].
A crucial difference of
opinion between Benedict XVI and the American
evangelicals lies in the question of when Jews
shall recognize Jesus as their Messiah. Although
Benedict believes that Christians should not
"force their faith" upon Jews and should live with
them in mutual respect, he would prefer that they
do so immediately. Although the evangelicals
proselytize Jews to the endless annoyance of
Jewish religious authorities, they believe that
Jews will recognize Jesus only at the end of time.
Liberal Jews object that the evangelicals wish for
a new Battle of Armageddon in the Middle East,
which is a silly complaint; on the contrary, the
evangelicals mean that they would prefer that Jews
remain Jews until Jesus extends an invitation in
person.
American Protestantism, to be
sure, was tinged with a Judaizing heresy from the
outset (What makes
the US a Christian nation, November 28,
2004). Founded by Protestant separatists who
wished to bring a new chosen people to a new
promised land, America may be the only country in
the world in which Christians openly might adopt
Rosenzweig's perspective.
For
Benedict XVI to
identify the scriptural promise to Abraham with Abraham's
descendents, for example, the present state
of Israel, would present formidable problems.
Today's Europeans, in their desire to appease
the burgeoning Muslim population within their
borders, consider Israel a greater danger to world
peace than the states that Washington deems terrorist.
Slightly over half of Germans, according
to a recent poll, believe that Israel's treatment
of the Palestinians is no better than the
Nazis' treatment of the Jews, a response suggesting
the projection of Germany's own war guilt. The great
majority of the Italian Curia favors the
Palestinian rather than the Israeli side, and the
Vatican still objects to the Israeli claim of
Jerusalem as it capital, demanding instead that
Jerusalem become an international city.
In
a Europe that hates the Jews that no longer are
there, Benedict XVI will find exegesis of the
Hebrew Bible less challenging than dealing with a
people that actually speaks biblical Hebrew. His
effort to re-evangelize Europe with Abraham's
scriptural promise will crash against Europe's
hatred for Abraham's actual descendants.
That brings us to the matter of the musicians. Jews
look for the Kingdom of God in the sanctified life
of a human family, whose highest expression is
the Sabbath, "a foretaste of the world to
come". The wild shoots of the nations grafted onto
the olive tree of Israel hope for the Kingdom of
God beyond the grave. To establish a new people
in a new land, the founding dream of American Protestantism,
bespeaks a Judaizing heresy rather
than strict adherence to Christian doctrine. If
the grave separates the life of this earth and
the blessed realm beyond, beauty must provide a
"foretaste of the world to come". This theme permeates
the thinking of St Augustine, and stood at
the center of the "theology of aesthetics" of
Hans Urs von Balthasar, the Catholic theologian
who formed the thinking of pope John
Paul II as well as his successor, Benedict XVI [9]. Its
watchword is, "The beautiful and the good are
essentially one," as John Paul II told a
conference on June 28, 1996.
Equating the
good and the beautiful defines the thought of
classical Greece: the divine on earth shows itself
to mortal eyes through the eternal harmonies.
Among 20th century thinkers, Albert Einstein is the
most credible advocate of this view, for he
searched for beauty in nature and in mathematics
as the touchstone of truth. But Einstein was a
Spinozan pantheist, not a believing Jew, who
looked for a God within nature. How can beauty
lead to the good in a Christian context? The
answer is that one has to look for "inner beauty"
rather than mere "outer beauty" and that is a very
long story.
"Being struck by the ray of
beauty that wounds man is true perception,"
Ratzinger entitled a 2002 address. He said (I
translate):
Being overpowered by the beauty of
Christ is a more real and deeper perception than
mere rational deduction. We should not deprecate
the importance of theological reflection, of
precise and careful theological thinking - that
remains absolutely necessary. But to have
contempt for, or to reject therefore the shock
of the heart's encounter with beauty as the true
way to perception impoverishes and makes empty
faith as well as theology. We must find our way
back to this way of perception - that is an
urgent demand of this hour [10]. For
Ratzinger, music is the exemplar of such beauty.
He added:
I cannot forget the Bach concert
that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after
the early death of Karl Richter. I sat next to
the evangelical Bishop Hanselmann. As the final
tones of one of the great cantatas of the Cantor
of St Thomas died away triumphally, we looked at
each other spontaneously and, just as
spontaneously, said to each other: anyone who
has heard that knows that faith is true.
Amen to that. But the beauty of
Apollo to which Plato appealed "is not enough",
Ratzinger continued. "Thus we come to the paradox
that it can be said of Christ that 'you are the
most beautiful of all men', even when his face was
disfigured ... Just in that disfigured face, the
true and final beauty emerges; the beauty of love
that goes to the last and shows itself stronger
than lies and violence."
That is a somewhat circular
argument; it is beautiful because it is true and
true because it is beautiful. Benedict has said
that Mozart's music is divine, whether Mozart
intended it so or not. One might say that about
the Coronation Mass or the
Requiem, but what of the opera Don
Giovanni
, a portrait of a seducer and murderer?
Beethoven thought Mozart's opera immoral;
Kierkegaard thought it "fatuous" to call the work
immoral because surrendering to the seductive
power of the music takes place in an aesthetic
context in which moral claims and moral actions do
not arise [11]. Neither view helps Benedict's
case.
Late in his life, von Balthasar
envisioned Mozart among the saints in heaven
during sessions with his spiritual muse Adrienne
von Speyr. "Can you see Mozart?" von Balthasar
would ask Adrienne, the co-founder of his
Community of St John. "Yes, I see him," Adrienne
would smile.
Yes, I see him praying. I see him
praying something, maybe an Our Father. Simple
words, which he learned in his childhood, and
which he prays in awareness that he is speaking
with God. And then he stands before God like a
child, bringing his father everything: pebbles
from the street and special twigs and little
blades of grass, and once a ladybird as well,
and with him all these are melodies, melodies
which he brings the dear Lord, melodies which he
suddenly knows in prayer [12]. That doesn't sound like the
Mozart who wrote Don Giovanni
, not to mention some particularly ribald
canons [13].
Truth and beauty are not
twins, in my view, but first cousins of passing
acquaintance. The truth that God speaks to Job out
of the whirlwind is not beautiful; on the
contrary, it is terrible.
To be continued.
NOTES
[1] In the
chapter of Leviathan titled, "The Comparison of
the Catholic Church and the Kingdom of Fairies".
[2] Es mögen wohl Gespenster sin,
Altheidnisch göttlichen Gelichters;
Sie
wählen gern zum Tummelplatz
Den Schädel eines
toten Dichters.
From Heinrich Heine's
Lazarus, translation by the author.
[3]
See Heinrich Heine, Beitraege zur deutschen
Ideologie (Ullstein: Frankfurt 1971), p 22.
[4] The most important of these are collected
in a small volume titled Many Religions, One
Covenant: Israel, the Church, and the World
(Ignatius Press: San Francisco 1998). It is
out of print, but most of the former cardinal
Ratzinger's thoughts are available on the
Internet.
[5] See Shmuel Trigano, Is There A Future for French
Jewry?,
in Azure No 20.
[6] Ratzinger, op cit.
56.
[7] Franz Rosenzweig, "The Star of
Redemption", trans. William Hallo (University of
Notre Dame Press: London 1985), p 415.
[8]
Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham's Promise, R
Kendall Soulen, ed (William B Eerdmans; Grand
Rapids, 2004), p 9.
[9] See Oliver Davies,
"The theological aesthetics", in The Cambridge
Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge
2004).
[10] http://www.gemeinschaftundbefreiung.at/aktuelles/ratzinger
20020821meetingrimini.htm
[11] See George Pattison,
"Art in an Age of Reflection", in The
Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard
(Cambridge 1998), p 84.
[12]
Quoted in Mark Freer, "Von Balthasar, Mozart, and
the Quest of Beauty".
[13] For
example,
Bona nox! (Good
night)
Bist a rechta Ochs (You're a real
ox)
Bona notte
Liebe Lotte
Bonne
nuit,
Pfui, pfui
Good night, good
night
Heut müssma noch weit (We still
have far to go today)
Scheiß ins Bett, daß'
kracht; (Shit in your bed until it
cracks)
Schalf fei' g'sund und (Sleep
soundly and)
Reck' den Arsch zum Mund.
(Stretch your ass to your mouth).
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