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Why the beautiful is not the
good
By Spengler
Pearls
grow in oysters to soothe irritation; the high art
of the West grew pearl-like in Christendom around
an abrasion it could not heal: the refusal of mere
humans to place all their hopes upon the promise
of life after death. Christianity made Europe by
offering the kingdom of heaven to barbarian
invaders, while allowing them to keep their tribal
culture. The high art of the West gave these rude
men a presentiment of the kingdom of heaven and
formed an authentic Christian culture opposed to
pagan holdovers.
Pope Benedict XVI understands
the power of high art as well as any man alive. At
the center of his concerns are the musicians and
the Jews (See last week's Spengler, The pope, the musicians and the
Jews). If the Jew converts the Christian's
inner pagan, as Franz Rosenzweig said, the
musician gives him a foretaste of heaven. The beautiful,
within the Catholic "theology of aesthetics",
forms the earthly visage of the unearthly
good. Yet the good is not quite the same as
the beautiful. High culture betrayed the interests
of the Church almost upon its birth during
the late 15th century, and again during the classical
German period. On both occasions the Church
responded time and again by clipping the angels'
wings.
The tragedy of Christendom's
encounter with the Jews has no end of telling, but
nearly untold is the sad tale of betrayal and
distrust between the Church and its musicians.
These two tragic stories conjoined at the
Benedictine Abbey of Maria-Laach in 1933, where
the custodians of ecclesiastical music in Germany
hailed Adolf Hitler as the savior of Germany. The
same churchmen who earlier had rejected the
classical style music in favor of a specious
version of the religious music of the Middle Ages
also embraced Hitler's sham medievalism. Europe's
musicians and Europe's Jews perished together, for
the same. Later I will return to this tale, but
first it is necessary to explain why music is a
burning issue for Benedict XVI and his Church.
For the new pope, sacred music does not
merely put the communicant in the right mood.
Music, he believes, in a sense, becomes the
communion, as he told Church musicians 20
years ago:
Faith becoming music is part of the process
of the word becoming flesh …When the word
becomes music, there is involved on the one hand
perceptible illustration, incarnation or taking
on flesh, attraction of pre-rational powers, a
drawing upon the hidden resonance of creation, a
discovery of the song which lies at the basis of
all things. And so this becoming music is itself
the very turning point in the movement: it
involves not only the word becoming flesh, but
simultaneously the flesh becoming spirit.
[1] These are the words of a mystic,
of a fisher of souls. His predecessor was that
too, but more inclined to catch-and-release. John
Paul II bestrode the stage like a rock star,
chanting to youthful crowds, "Woo-hoo-woo! John
Paul II, he loves you!" He shared a stage with Bob
Dylan as well as "walk on the wild side" rocker
Lou Reed. Benedict XVI has radically different
views. Citing the same speech:
... Rock music seeks release through
liberation from the personality and its
responsibility ... [it is] among the anarchic
ideas of freedom which today [1985] predominate
more openly in the West than in the East. But
that is precisely why rock music is so
completely antithetical to the Christian concept
of redemption and freedom, indeed its exact
opposite. Hence music of this type must be
excluded from the Church on principle, and not
merely for aesthetic reasons, or because of
restorative crankiness or historical
inflexibility. Classical music, he
conceded, has "been forced back on all fronts into
the position of a mere subculture". But even in
the Western world we should not be frightened by
the term "subculture". In the cultural crisis we
are currently experiencing, new cultural
purification and unification can break forth only
from islands of spiritual composure.
As Benedict, then
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, warned in 1996, "we may
have to give up the notion of a popular Church"
(see Ratzinger's Mustard
Seed, April 5, 2005). Benedict hopes
for "a sacred music [that] bequeaths joy and a
higher type of ecstasy which does not extinguish
personality, but unites and thus liberates", and
for musicians who "will ask: how can that be
accomplished?"
John Paul II erred woefully
in fishing for young converts with the net of pop
culture. For all his personal magnetism, his long
reign left the faithful in rebellion against the
standards of the Church, unable to replace aging
clergy and beset by clerical scandals arising
from general tolerance of aberrant behavior. The
permissive message of rock music from the
beginning has been, "If it feels good, do it," and
it should be no surprise that a church that relies
on feel-good music finds itself with clergy who
take the message to bed.
Once there were
great musicians who composed the music Benedict
requires, but the Church spurned them. In 1820
Beethoven finished Missa Solemnis as an
exemplar of what he called "true Church music",
doubtless the best Catholic composition of the
19th century. His biographer, Anton Schindler,
describes Beethoven writing the fugue of the
Credo,
... singing, yelling, stamping his
feet ... The door opened and Beethoven stood
before us, his features distorted to the point
of inspiring terror. He looked as though he had
just engaged in a life and death struggle with
the whole army of contrapuntists, his
everlasting enemies. The "contrapuntists" in this case
were the composers sanctioned by Church
authorities, who discouraged its performance in
churches until after Vatican II. Along with
Beethoven's spurned offering upon the altar the
Church suppressed the orchestral masses of Mozart,
Franz Joseph Haydn, and Franz Peter Schubert. As a result,
the 19th century gave us Gioacchino
Rossini's Stabat
Mater, Giuseppe Verdi's Manzoni Requiem (perhaps
the least sacred of all settings off the liturgy),
Gabriel
Faure's Requiem, a few pieces by Anton Bruckner -
a poverty of Church music compared to the
inexpressible riches of the century before.
Whatever else it may have been, the Church
never has been stupid. It takes drastic measures
for a reason. No single action has stained the
reputation of the Church more darkly than the
Spanish Inquisition and the 1492 expulsion of the
Jews from Spain, yet (as I argued in No one
Expects the Spanish Inquisition, June
22, 2004), the action was not irrational. With
Jews came access to the Hebrew scriptures and then
Protestantism, and with Protestantism came
religious wars that nearly destroyed France during
the 16th century and killed over half the
population of German-speaking Europe during the
17th century. Spain suppressed Protestantism at
the outset and avoided a cataclysmic civil war,
until 1936, that is.
Nor did the Church
scourge the musicians arbitrarily. Napoleon
stabled horses in cathedrals, and his imperial
ambition - barely checked by the combined power of
England, Germany and Russia - would have ruined
the Church. The Church saw not the Mozart of
Adrienne von Speyr's beatific vision, but the
Freemason and portrayer of libertines. In 1786,
Mozart offered The Marriage of Figaro, an
operatic adaption of Beaumarchais' vicious satire
of the French nobility. Two years before the
French revolution the cast of Mozart's opera
Don Giovanni broke character during the
second act finale and to a martial accompaniment
together sang, "Viva la liberta!" ("Long
live liberty!"). Two years after the French
Revolution had broken out Mozart composed The
Magic Flute, a Freemasonic opera portraying a
secular cult of wisdom.
Mozart was of course
a Catholic who composed luminous music for the
Church, although with his two most important works,
the C Minor Mass and D Minor
Requiem, his sympathies lay with the new
secular order. That much the Church might have
forgiven, but what it could not abide about Mozart
was a quality he shared with Shakespeare and
Goethe: as an author he stood in place of God.
Heinrich Heine commented that there are no minor
characters in the works of either poet, because
any figure becomes a major character the moment
the author, like God, turns his attention to him.
Mozart is not the God, but a god.
Mozart is the master of divine ambiguity. We do not
know whether to laugh or cry at Don Giovanni's
murderous escapades. We do not know what set of
emotions with which to respond to a concerto
movement; a merry interlude will become ominous,
or plaintive, or exalting at a flicker of Mozart's
Olympian eyebrows. Good and evil, reverence and
impiety, devotion and sacrilege, solemnity and
hilarity, in short, all the attributes of human
life present themselves at once. In the second act
finale of Don Giovanni, we hear Giovanni
toast women and wine while his spurned mistress
Elvira begs him to acknowledge her suffering and
his servant Leporello comments on his master's
hard heart - all clearly expressed as individuals,
yet simultaneous and unified in Mozart's trio. He
gives us all of humanity, good, evil and
indifferent.
It is well for Benedict XVI to think of
the angels in heaven playing Mozart for their own
enjoyment, as he has said, but it is just as easy
to imagine the devils in hell doing the same thing.
In the afterlife, Mozart would be composing for both
of them, and would have them singing together in
e-chorus, precisely as he did at Prague in
1787. If Christ returned to earth, men would crucify
him again, and if Mozart - the real Mozart, not
the vacuous child of Adrienne von Speyr's seances -
were to return to earth, the Church once again
would put him on the index of prohibited works. Now
that Mozart is two centuries dead he is safe for
canonization. "The beginnings of great sacred
music necessarily lie in reverence, in
receptivity, and in that humility which is
prepared to serve and to minister while partaking
of already existing greatness," wrote Benedict XVI
in 1985. Mozart would have not understood the
question.
When the Church suppressed the
classical composers after the Napoleonic Wars, it
turned against its musicians for the second time.
In 1555 the Church considered banning the
contrapuntal style of ecclesiastical music, one of
the glories of the High Renaissance, on the
grounds that the interplay of voices gave too
little weight to the religious text. Pope
Marcellus II instructed the papal choir that music
should be composed "in a suitable manner, with
properly modulated voices, so that everything
could both be heard and properly understood". The
popular story is false that Palestina's Missa
Pape Marcelli dissuaded the Church from
prohibiting counterpoint, but the intervention
sent a chill into the Church's musicians.
What we today recognize as Western music
had appeared suddenly just a century before.
Johannes Tinctorus, the founder of modern music
theory, remarked in 1470 that the only music worth
listening to had been written during the preceding
40 years. Modern ears recoil, however, at the
music of the 1430's, but listen gratefully to the
composers of the 1480's and onward, for example
the Flemish master Josquin Desprez. The music of
the early 15th century looks backward to the
Middle Ages while the music of the late 15th
century looks forward to us.
Ideas and
techniques that European composers had been
groping toward for centuries took shape in a
remarkably short period of time. What accounts for
this? There are many possible reasons. One of the
most important can be viewed by the casual visitor
to the public exhibits of the Vatican Library in
Rome this month. On display is a remarkable
manuscript containing ancient Greek treatises on
music, owned by the future Pope Marcellus II,
including extracts of Aristoxenus, a student of
Aristotle. Half a millennium before Christ,
Aristoxenus already had enunciated the fundamental
idea that underlies Western music: the harmonic
intervals govern the movement of melody through
time. Harmony, that is, existed as the guiding
principle of horizontal melody before composers
thought in terms of vertical harmony. That is what
makes it possible integrate the vertical flow of
melody and the horizontal ordering of harmonies,
and to blend two or more melodies in counterpoint. And
that is what distinguishes the music of Josquin in
the late 15th century from composers a generation
older. Plainchant adapted itself to the prose
texts of scripture; the new counterpoint required
text cut into measures, for only by ordering time
into discrete intervals could musicians reconcile
the demands of melodic flow and vertical harmony.
In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks
and the arrival in Europe of Greek refugees
carrying with them a treasure of Greek works
followed, including many not yet known to Western
Europeans. The Renaissance of classical learning
gave birth to the integration of space in painting
and the integration of harmony in music. The
individual stood in the place of God and set the
world in perspective and played in the garden of
universal harmonies.
At the turn of the
16th century, the composer exercised a new and
awesome power, drawing, as Benedict XVI observed,
upon pre-conscious powers of the mind. In music as
in visual arts the creative individual became
master as well as servant. To make sense of the
revolution in the arts and its influence upon
religion, above all the individualism of the
Reformers, would require a treatise, but the
connection was not lost upon the Church. It
suppressed not only theological inquiry but also
musical composition.
As
in the case of the Inquisition, the actions of the
Church appear as tragic rather than foolish or
malicious. The same musical style that exalted the
faith could wallow in sensuality. The same
composers wrote sacred motets and ribald
madrigals. Mozart's Don Giovanni at least gets dragged to hell, but
Monteverdi's Nero gets his Poppea after murdering
his wife, the philosopher Seneca, and various
other worthies. His 1643 opera concludes with a
gorgeous duet between Nero and his paramour
celebrating their lust.
Power over nature
is good, but it is not the good, for evil
men can use this power for evil purposes; the case
comes to mind of the physicist Werner Heisenberg
attempting to build a nuclear weapon for Hitler.
In some fashion music also involves a power over
nature, or at least knowledge of nature's
potential in the form of harmonies. I am not a
scientist, but I am prepared to believe Einstein's
claim that the beauty of nature reveals itself in
harmony. In music, the capacity to move men by
evoking their pre-conscious powers is good, but it
is not the good.
Of all the
Catholic writers, J R R Tolkien understood this
point perhaps the best. His high-Elven master
smith Feanor created the Silmarils, three jewels
of astonishing beauty, and went to war when they
were stolen. His defect was exceeding pride in the
work of his hands. The tragedy of the Elves to
some extent is the tragedy of the artists.
Ultimately it is the virtues of the humble Hobbits
rather than the magnificence of the Elves that
will prevail. Music, like science, offers mere
potential for good; the good is sui
generis. For art to serve the good, the artist
must first be good. Benedict XVI, as noted, stated
that "reverence, receptivity and humility"
characterize the musician whose art exalts rather
than confuses the listener. Religion can engage
art as its servant only after it has converted the
artist.
Whence comes the good? The
Biblical notion that human suffering moves the
creator of heaven and earth, such that this
creator cannot help but attend to the cry of the
widow and fatherless, the ugly and the crippled,
appears orthogonal to the Greek concept of beauty
and harmony. It is a crude, shocking, baseless
claim which, for better or worse, is far and away
the most influential idea in human history.
As Franz Rosenzweig observed, the Jews who
first reported this idea as a revelation remained
committed to it because their hope flowed in their
veins with their blood. The promise of revelation
to the Jews lies in the continuity of Abraham's
family, not eternal life. The Catholic Church
relied upon the great cathedrals, frescoes and
motets to convert the inner pagan of its flock,
but it could not convert the artists themselves.
European high culture only could end in tragedy.
Wagner's Wotan comes to mind, building his
fortress of Valhalla with the hired labor of
giants who demanded a price - eternal youth - that
Wotan could not pay.
When it turned upon
the artists of the 18th-century classic, the
Church set in motion a tragedy with frightful
consequences. Rejecting the operatic style in
sacred music, the Church as a corrective reached
back to the plainchant of the low Middle Ages. Its
musical doctrine formed part of a broader effort
to recreate a tranquil Age of Faith undisturbed by
the storms of secular modernism. But no such age
ever had existed, and the plainchant of the 19th
century was not a revival but a fabrication. The
modernists merely proposed to invent the future,
but the Church did worse: it invented the past.
The final act of the tragedy played out when the
Benedictine monks of Maria-Laach welcomed Hitler
in 1933.
To be continued.
NOTE
[1] Address to
the XVIII International Church Music Congress in
Rome, November 17, 1985, translated as "Liturgy in
Church Music" in Sacred Music, Vol 112 No 4
(Winter 1985). I have not found this seminal
statement on the web.
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