Part VI

All of this is now replaced by creativity, in which the autonomy of those emancipated attempts to corroborate or ratify itself. Such a creativity, which aspires to be a functional expression of autonomy and emancipation, is—precisely on that account—diametrically opposed to any form of partaking. Characteristic of this creativity is arbitrariness as a necessary expression of the rejection of all prescribed forms or rules, unrepeatability because repetition would already imply dependence, and artificiality because it is necessarily a case of purely human production. And so we see that human creativity which refuses to receive and to partake, is contradictory and untrue in its very nature, because man can only be man through receiving and partaking. Such creativity is escape from the conditio humana and therefore falsehood.

This is ultimately why cultural decadence begins at the point where along with the loss of faith in God a pre-established reasonableness of being must also be called into question.

Let us now summarize our findings so that we can draw consequences for the point of departure and the basic form of church music. It has become evident that the primacy of the group derives from an understanding of the Church as institution based upon a concept of freedom which is incompatible with the idea and the reality of the institutional. Indeed, this idea of freedom is no longer capable of grasping the dimension of the mysterium in the reality of the Church. Freedom is conceived in terms of autonomy and emancipation, and takes concrete shape in the idea of creativity, which against this background is the exact opposite of that objectivity and positiveness which belong to the essence of the Church’s liturgy. The group is truly free only when it discovers itself anew each time.

We also found that liturgy worthy of the name is the radical antithesis of all this. Genuine liturgy is opposed to an historical arbitrariness which knows no development and hence is ultimately vacuous. Genuine liturgy is also opposed to an unrepeatability which is also exclusivity and loss of communication without regard for any groupings. Genuine liturgy is not opposed to the technical, but to the artificial, in which man creates a counter-world for himself and loses sight of, indeed loses a feeling for, God’s creation. The antitheses are evident as is the incipient clarification of the inner justification for group thinking as an autonomistically conceived idea of freedom. But now we must inquire positively as to the anthropological concept which forms the basis for the liturgy in the sense of the Church’s faith.

Part VII

2. The anthropological pattern of the Church’s liturgy

The answer to our question is suggested by two fundamental statements in the New Testament. Saint Paul coined the expression logike Iatreia in Romans 12:1, but this is very difficult to translate because we lack a satisfactory equivalent for the concept of logos. It might perhaps be translated “logos-like worship” or worship fixed or determined by the Spirit, which would also echo Jesus’ statement about adoration in spirit and in truth (John 4:23). But it is also possible to translate adoration stamped or marked by the word, adding of course that in a biblical sense (as well as in the Greek meaning) “word” is more than mere speech or language: it is creative reality. To be sure, it is also more than mere thought or spirit: it is spirit which explains and communicates itself. The relationship to a text, the rationality, the intelligibility and the sobriety of Christian liturgy have always been deduced from this fact and presupposed as the basic norm of liturgical music. But it would be a restrictive and a false interpretation to understand this norm as strictly requiring of all liturgical music a very close link with the text, or to declare the intelligibility of the text to be a general requirement for all liturgical music. After all, “word” in the biblical sense is more than text and comprehension includes more than the banal perspicuity of what is obvious to everyone, what is to be compressed into the most superficial rationality. It is quite correct, however that music which serves the adoration in spirit and in truth cannot be rhythmic ecstasy sensual suggestion or stupefaction subjective emotional bliss or superficial entertainment. It is rather subordinated to a message to a comprehensive spiritual statement which is rational in the highest sense of the word. In other words it is quite correct to say that such music must correspond in its innermost nature to this “word” in a comprehensive sense, indeed must serve it.

And so we are quite naturally led to another text which makes the really fundamental biblical statement about worship by clarifying for us the importance of the “word” and its relationship with us. I refer to that sentence in the prologue of Saint John’s gospel: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory” (John 1:13). First of all, the “word” to which Christian worship refers is not a text, but a living reality: a God Who is meaning, communicating Itself, and Who communicates Himself by becoming man. This Incarnation is now the holy tent or tabernacle, the point of reference for all cult, which is a gazing upon God’s glory and does Him honor. But these statements of Saint John’s prologue do not convey the complete picture. The passages will be misunderstood unless we take them together with the “farewell speeches” of Jesus, in which He says to His disciples, “If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again. I go away, and I come unto you. It is expedient to you that I go, for if I go not, the Paraclete will not come to you (John 12:2 ff., 14:18 ff., 16:5 ff., etc.). The Incarnation is only the first step in a longer process which moves to a final and meaningful conclusion in the Cross and the Resurrection. From the Cross, the Lord draws everything to Himself and bears what is corporeal, i.e., man and the whole created world, into God’s eternity.

The liturgy is subordinate to this movement, which we might call the basic text to which all liturgical music refers: music must be measured from within by the standard of this line of motion. Liturgical music is a result of the demands and of the dynamism of the Incarnation of the Word, for music means that even among us, the word cannot be mere speech. The principal ways in which the Incarnation continues to operate are of course the sacramental signs themselves. But they are quite misplaced if they are not immersed in a liturgy which as a whole follows this expansion of the Word into the corporeal and into the sphere of all our senses. It is this fact which justifies and indeed renders necessary images in complete contrast to Jewish and Islamic types of worship. This is also the reason why it is necessary to appeal to those deeper levels of comprehension and response which become accessible through music. Faith becoming music is part of the process of the Word becoming flesh. But at the same time, this “becoming music” is also subordinated in a completely unique way to that inner evolution of the Incarnation event which I tried to hint at earlier the Word become flesh comes to be, in the Cross and Resurrection, flesh become Word. Both are permeated with each other. The Incarnation is not revoked, but becomes definitive at that instant in which the movement turns around, so to speak: flesh itself becomes Word, is “logocized,” but precisely this transformation brings about a new unity of all reality which was obviously so important to God that He paid for it at the price of the Son’s Cross.

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; Brass and wood become sound; what is unconscious and unsettled becomes orderly and meaningful resonance. What takes place is an embodiment or incarnation which is spiritualization and a spiritualization which is incarnation or em-body-ment Christian incarnation or embodiment is always simultaneously spiritualization and Christian spiritualization is em-body-ment into the body of the Logos become man.

Part VIII


4. The consequences for liturgical music

a) Basic principles

To the degree that in music this conjunction of both movements takes place, music serves in the highest degree and in an irreplaceable manner that interior exodus which liturgy always is and wants to be. This means that the propriety of liturgical music is measured by its inner conformity to this basic anthropological and theological model. At first glance, such a statement seems far removed from concrete musical realities. But the statement becomes very concrete indeed when we consider the antithetical models of cultic music which I mentioned earlier. Or we can recall the Dionysiac type of religion and its music, which Plato discussed on the basis of his religious and philosophical views. In many forms of religion, music is associated with frenzy and ecstasy. The free expansion of human existence, toward which man’s own hunger for the Infinite is directed, is supposed to be achieved through sacred delirium induced by frenzied instrumental rhythms. Such music lowers the barriers of individuality and personality, and in it man liberates himself from the burden of consciousness. Music becomes ecstasy, liberation from the ego, amalgamation with the universe.

Today we experience the secularized variation of this type in rock and pop music, whose festivals are an anti-cult with the same tendency: desire for destruction, repealing the limitations of the everyday, and the illusion of salvation in liberation from the ego, in the wild ecstasy of a tumultuous crowd. These are measures which involve a form of release related to that achieved through drugs. It is the complete antithesis of Christian faith in the Redemption. Accordingly, it is only logical that in this area diabolical cults and demonic musics are on the increase today, and their dangerous power of deliberately destroying personality is not yet taken seriously enough. The dispute between Dionysiac and Apolline music which Plato tried to arbitrate, is not our concern, since Apollo is not Christ. But the question which Plato posed concerns us in a most significant way.

In a way which we could not imagine thirty years ago, music has become the decisive vehicle of a counter-religion and thus calls for a parting of the ways. Since rock music seeks release through liberation from the personality and its responsibility, it can be on the one hand precisely classified among the anarchic ideas of freedom which today 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.