Kenotic logic: Cynthia Bourgeault and Gavin Bryars

As those of you who come to this blog via our front page www.sdgmusic.org probably already know, next week is going to be an intense one for SOLI DEO GLORIA, with three of our newly-commissioned works being sung for the first time. In addition they will all be coming to life on British soil, which curiously represents fresh territory in terms of SDG’s activity in the area of New Music. On Thursday May 10th the Grammy-nominated Danish vocal ensemble Ars Nova Copenhagen be giving the first performances of pieces by living legend Gavin Bryars (Psalm 141) and myself (the choral cycle Spiritus divinae lucis gloriae) at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in Wales, while three days later the choir of Westminster Catholic Cathedral in London will be singing a fascinating new English/Hebrew setting of Psalm 135/136 by Roxanna Panufnik during Sunday Vespers.

Westminster Cathedral

I will certainly be reporting back on what should be an exciting few days, but before I head off in the direction of the Eurotunnel some equally serious business is afoot here in Paris on Monday, when I will have the privilege of conducting a radio interview on Fréquence Protestante with Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault, one of the most compelling contemporary writers and presenters working in the area of contemplative Christian spirituality. An Episcopal priest who spends much of the year at the Trappist hermitage on Eagle Island, Maine, Rev. Bourgeault is currently in France and will be speaking at the American Church in Paris on May 10. I had already known her work for some time through some captivating audio-visual footage of her presentations on Centering Prayer as well as her daring yet consistently responsible re-appraisal of the relevance of Mary Magdalene (the subject of her book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity) for the Church in a post-Da Vinci Code era. What I did not realize, however, until I began to do some a little exploration of her page at http://www.contemplative.org/cynthia.html in preparation for Monday’s interview, is that Cynthia Bourgeault is also a trained musicologist of impeccable pedigree, having studied here in France with none other than Nadia Boulanger. Not only that, but she also has a keen interest in New Music, having collaborated with the Aspen composer Ray Vincent Adams in creating a musical Passion setting to which she contributed the libretto .

Those interested in exploring Cynthia’s work will find a rich variety of resources on her web page, including a moving tribute to one of our mutual spiritual heroes, Brother Roger of Taizé and a thought-provoking series of ‘observations and reflections on the Future of Church’ (written in dialogue with Christopher Page); the issues on which she touches with great creativity are so wide-ranging that I feel a little daunted by the task of restricting our broadcast conversation on Monday to a mere 25 minutes!  There is a well-nigh infinite range of topics we could discuss, but I suppose that if I had to focus on one key question it would be this – what is the significance of the re-discovery of the contemplative tradition not only for the Church but for our contemporary Western civilization, and why is this re-discovery happening at the present time? It is certainly a remarkable phenomenon that over the last few decades, an increasing number of people (including myself) have been drawn to the notion that the spiritual way forward for the West lies at least partially in ressourcement, a retrieval of ‘the sources’ of ancient Judeo-Christian spirituality (in which, as Thomas Merton and others such as Huston Smith and Harvey Cox have pointed out for a long time, many points of contact are to be found with the world’s other great wisdom traditions). Lest there be any misunderstanding here,  I am not speaking about some archaizing, anti-scientific retreat into dogmatic religious certainties in the face of the perceived godlessness of late modernity. It may surprise some who associate monasticism with a quaint nostalgia for a distant bygone era to discover that Cynthia Bourgeault’s work is peppered with allusions to quantum physics and contemporary neuroscience. Such references are doubtless bound to raise the blood pressure of proponents of a reductionistic scientism such as the polemical blogger PZ Myers, whose current undignified spat with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard (co-author of The Spiritual Brain)  over at www.salon.com is indicative of a skeptical mindset for which any rapprochement between science and spirituality is anathema. The parallels which Cynthia draws however definitely resonate with folks such as myself who view the idea of a remorseless struggle between science and faith as a socio-historical construct rather than a logical necessity, and who are convinced that we are currently witnessing the gradual emergence of new non-materialistic paradigms within science (pioneered by figures such as Beauregard) which will be far more amenable to dialogue with the world’s great faith traditions than is widely believed.

Although Cynthia Bourgeault’s writing and speaking on Centering Prayer is intimately linked to spiritual practice, it would be a mistake to think that her prime concern is the propagation of a set of meditative techniques; I would prefer to see her work more broadly in terms of passionate advocacy of the importance for our society of recovering a contemplative attitude towards reality.  This stance, founded on an awareness of the inter-connectedness of creation’s participation in transcendental goodness, beauty and truth, is antithetical to the logic of domination that has marked so much of Western rationalistic thought since the Enlightenment, supremely expressed in the apotheosis of technology (Jacques Ellul’s système technique, a dualistic scheme in which an all-powerful human subject triumphs over lifeless matter). Such exclusionary binary thinking is marked by an inherent violence whose consequences for human community and the planet more generally are becoming ever more apparent. This, one might say, is the manifestation of the egoistic, aggressive chimp in all of us whom we so often fail to humanize (one of Cynthia Bourgeault’s choice expressions borrowed from Buddhist terminology is ‘monkey mind’) . A central contention of eminent modern contemplatives such as Cynthia Bourgeault and Richard Rohr is that this mentality – the source of many of our individual and social tensions – needs to be overcome by ‘non-dual’, holistic thought and living.  To the extent that this transition can only come about by a renunciation of the ego’s desire to dominate others and the world, it requires a kenotic stance of self-emptying spoken of in many religious traditions, but for Christians supremely exhibited in the  life of the Rabbi of Nazareth whose path Henri Nouwen famously called the ‘way of downward mobility’.

Which brings me to Gavin Bryars.

I sometimes ask myself what would be my top five pieces of sacred ‘classical’ music of the last fifty years. My truly indispensable Desert Island Discs (only one per composer allowed here). Olivier Messiaen would have to be onboard, although I’d be hard pressed to choose between La Transfiguration, Des Canyons aux Etoiles and St François d’Assise. At least one of Arvo Pärt’s masterpieces would surely also have to be in there (I’m spoilt for choice here – Como una cierva?, La Sindone? Perhaps Kanon Pokajanen, or maybe Tabula Rasa despite its lack of an overtly ‘sacred title’?). Steve Reich’s Tehillim would probably make it into the top five from the Jewish side, and I would be strongly inclined to take some Gorecki with me (Symphony n.2 or 3? Beatus Vir? Lerchenmusik?). Alfred Schnittke’s Choir Concerto, Sofia Gubaidulina’s Offertorium and Jean-Louis Florentz’s haunting Laudes for organ would all be strong contenders for inclusion. But one piece I cannot imagine not taking with me to any Desert Island would be Jesus’ blood never failed me yet by Gavin Bryars. Or, to be more precise, by Gavin Bryars and the unidentified ‘tramp’ whose singing is immortalized in this unique, unforgettable piece.

On Bryars’ website you can find the now legendary story of how Jesus’ blood never failed me yet came into being as the composer was toying with some discarded tape from a documentary film about the London homeless made with his friend Alan Power in 1971. Making a tape loop out of a religious song sung by one of the film’s interviewees – not an alcoholic, it should be noted in passing – , Bryars took the reel for copying to the Fine Arts Department at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) where he was working. There he noticed something quite unexpected:

‘The door of the recording room opened on to one of the large painting studios and I left the tape copying, with the door open, while I went to have a cup of coffee. When I came back I found the normally lively room unnaturally subdued. People were moving about much more slowly than usual and a few were sitting alone, quietly weeping. I was puzzled until I realised that the tape was still playing and that they had been overcome by the old man’s singing.’

This extraordinary reaction, with which almost anyone who has heard Jesus’ blood will surely empathize, persuaded Bryars to write ‘a simple, though gradually evolving, orchestral accompaniment that respected the tramp’s nobility and simple faith’, the result being ‘an eloquent, but understated testimony to his spirit and optimism’.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to give a verbal description of the impact of the tramp’s song (‘Jesus’ blood never failed me yet … this one thing I know, for he loves me so’) on the listener, but if any piece of music merits the word ‘kenotic’, it is surely has to be this one. Here I am not merely talking of the tramp’s material poverty; for those of a religious persuasion, the combination of simplicity and brokenness to be found in his singing encapsulates the pure faith of the ‘poor in spirit’, while even many who do not share the tramp’s belief still find themselves overwhelmed by the sound of the elderly man’s voice as somehow epitomizing the human condition. Moreover, Jesus’ blood is also ‘kenotic’ from the viewpoint of the composer (who, intriguingly, was at the time primarily interested in Zen Buddhism, having become disillusioned as a student with the Congregationalist faith in which he had been raised[1]); the artistic success of the work derives in large measure from Bryars’ own receptivity to his objet trouvé and sensitivity to the inflections of the voice, which the piece follows sympathetically without ever seeking to manipulate, simply allowing it to be itself. This kind of artistic renunciation, the refusal to view composition as an act of imposition of the will on the musical material, sometimes termed spiritual minimalism – which Arvo Pärt, Henryk Gorecki and Valentin Silvestrov also all remarkably discovered independently of one another in the early 1970s – would seem to be the very stuff of contemplative, non-dual thinking. It might in addition be said that this music also requires a ‘kenotic’ attitude from the listener, who needs to let go of the intellectual gratification associated with strongly directional musical form and expectations of ‘development’; appreciating a piece such as Jesus’ blood does not so much require analysis as surrender.

I am perhaps not alone when I say that there are days in which I feel incapable of listening to any music other than Jesus’ blood never failed me yet, either in its original 1975 version or the extended treatment of 1993 featuring Tom Waits. Interestingly, the closest approximation I know to it is the repetitive prayer music written by the French organist Jacques Berthier for the Taizé Community (a subject on which Cynthia Bourgeault offers some thoughtful insights in her book The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind–A New Perspective on Christ and His Message), which at times bears a very strong aural resemblence to a tape loop. I vividly recall being part of a choir singing the refrain Spiritus Jesu Christi, Spiritus caritatis for a full 25 minutes at the Taizé European meeting in Wroclaw, Poland in 1989 – the same length as the 1975 recording of Jesus’ blood never failed me yet. Structured in a strangely similar manner to Gavin Bryars’ work and often communicating the same sense of timelessness, the music of Taizé is shot through, like the singing of the nameless elderly London tramp, with the spirit of the First Beatitude, as it is put in the words of one of Berthier’s most disarmingly simple canons:

Confiance du coeur, source de richesse. Jésus, donne-nous un coeur de pauvre

[Trust of the heart, source of riches. Jesus, give us poverty of heart]

Brother Roger of Taizé (1915-2005). Photo: Sabine Leutenegger

Cynthia Bourgeault’s interview with Peter Bannister (in English) for the program ‘ACP Today’ can be heard live at 8.45 p.m. Central European Time on Monday, May 7 on the Fréquence Protestante radio station either by tuning to 100.7 FM in the Paris area, or else via the website http://www.frequenceprotestante.com/ , where it will also be subsequently available in podcast form. Details of her presentation at the American Church in Paris can be found at http://www.acparis.org/thurber-thursdays/438-the-rev-dr-cynthia-bourgeault-speaks-at-thurber-thursday-and-the-annual-spring-retreat-for-adults

Further information about the Ars Nova Copenhagen concert featuring Gavin Bryars’ new setting of Psalm 141 and Peter Bannister’s Spiritus divinae lucis gloriae can be found at http://valeofglamorganfestival.org.uk/concerts/ars-nova-copenhagen/

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[1] A fascinating interview with Gavin Bryars discussing his Church upbringing and ongoing relationship with Christian spirituality (as well as Zen) can be found at http://www.gavinbryars.com/work/writing/occasional-writings/choral-music-re-questions

Copernichaos

I have always found the Polish capital city Warsaw (where I lived for a time in the 1990s) both an intriguingly and perplexingly multi-layered city. Urban development here has been so frenetic and apparently uncontrolled since 1989 that each time I come back here after even a few months away I find myself barely able to recognize the skyline. Apart that is, from the infamous ‘People’s Palace of Culture’ modelled on Moscow University, copies of which Stalin presented as highly ambiguous and unsolicited ‘gifts’ to various Central/Eastern European cities colonized by the Soviet Empire in 1945. Because there are more urgent economic priorities than the demolition of the eyesores of the communist era (and in the case of the city’s eastern half, the renovation of buildings damaged during the Second World War), the cityscape, not unlike that of Berlin, has become a curious mix of the hypermodern and the silently decaying. State-of-the-art shopping centres and new sports facilities constructed for the upcoming European Football Championships stand alongside dilapidated 1950s remnants of ecologically disastrous heavy industry as well as houses whose facades are still riddled with bullet holes dating from the final brutal months of World War II.

I find it difficult to be enthusiastic about most of the recent construction in this increasingly sprawling conurbation, much of which strikes me as depressingly anonymous, driven by a misguided desire to imitate Western consumer culture in all its blandness and superficiality. This strikes me as a great shame, not only because by all accounts pre-1939 Warsaw was an elegant and vibrant multi-cultural city (not least by virtue of its large Jewish population, the world of Isaac Bashevis Singer or the young Abraham Heschel which has tragically vanished forever), but also because a high degree of creativity has always distinguished Polish cultural and intellectual life and could surely have been harnessed in the service of a more inspiring form of urban regeneration.

There are, however, a few notable exceptions to the rule of pure functionalism, one of which is the Copernicus science education centre (Centrum Nauki Kopernik), the colour of whose exterior is intended to remind the onlooker of a meteorite. The Copernicus centre has rapidly become one of the city’s main attractions since it was opened last year, particularly for younger visitors who come by busload from all parts of the country. We have now been twice with our children to what is a joyously anarchic place, replete with possibilities for hands-on learning or just plain fun with various weird and wonderful contraptions intended to demonstrate all manner of scientific phenomena. We were even treated to a surrealistic piece of ‘robot theatre’ adapted from a typically strange and sarcastic tale by cult science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem (author of Solaris), whose dramatis personae resembled the figure below.

Robot, Centrum Nauki Kopernik, Warsaw

Perhaps my favourite exhibit at the Copernicus Centre is a deliciously absurd installation named ‘Copernichaos’ by the American artist Mary Ziegler,  which you can see by clicking here – a sort of perpetual motion machine in which tiny ball-bearings and fragments of metal are propelled by various springs and other mechanisms around a design taken from Mikolaj Kopernik’s epoch-making De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (‘On the revolutions of the heavenly bodies’). For me this installation seemed a nice encapsulation of the interplay of lawlike regularity – symbolized by Copernicus’s heliocentric system – and a freedom ‘at the edge of chaos’ underpinning the evolution of the cosmos – concepts which many of us involved in the faith-science dialogue at any level would correlate with the two words ‘Logos’ and ‘Spirit’ respectively, and on the subject of which I currently have the privilege of being engaged in a challenging public dialogue over at the blog ‘Homebrewed Christianity’ with Philip Clayton, one of contemporary theology’s most consistently creative representatives.

At a time when various strident voices in the Anglo-Saxon world persist in maintaining that science and religious faith are locked in mortal combat, it is perhaps worth pondering the Polish tradition embodied not only by Copernicus (a Catholic canon as well as a scientist) but more recently by the research groups initiated in Krakow by Pope John Paul II and continued by figures such as the late Archbishop Jozef Zycinski and Prof. Michal Heller (winner of the 2008 Templeton Prize), director of the Copernicus Interdisciplinary Research Centre. In this tradition, not only are scientific inquiry and the spiritual quest not in contradiction, but on the contrary represent two equally vital and complementary aspects of the search for truth which constitutes the driving force of human culture.

To my knowledge, room still remains as yet within Prof. Heller’s centre for a musical research programme. The relationship of music, science and theology is an area which surely ideal terrain for the type of interdisciplinary exploration being pioneered in Poland; that music (like theology) stands at the intersection of the arts and the sciences has been true historically from Pythagoras to Bach, Varèse or Messiaen. One of the clearest and most moving examples of such interconnections in a Polish context can be found in the monumental and unjustly under-performed Second Symphony, ‘Copernican’, Op. 31, by Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki (1933-2010), too often dismissed as a ‘one-hit-wonder’ by a public unfamiliar with any of his works beyond his celebrated Symphony of Sorrowful Songs Op.36.

Gorecki’s ‘Copernican’ Symphony, perhaps his masterwork, opens with gigantic orchestral repeated chords (whose ‘French’ harmonies seem to nod in the direction of Messiaen) – hammer-blows of cosmic proportions, transporting the listener into a realm in which huge primal forces collide. These unleash a startlingly abrasive, quasi-random atonal outburst for brass whose ‘Copernichaotic’ texture somewhat resembles Krzysztof Penderecki’s 1960s avant-garde works (which are now receiving an intriguing second lease of life thanks to his recent collaboration with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood(!)),

before the choir and soloists enter with a text taken from Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, which is extended at sidereal pace over the remaining seventeen or so minutes of the work;

Mikolaj Kopernik, page from manuscript of De revolutionibus coelestium (Jagiellonian Library, Krakow)

Keith Ward: Beethoven, Brahms … and Descartes’ revenge

As things get increasingly serious during Holy Week, this is a time at which our thoughts inevitably turn (or at least ought to turn) to the Big Questions of religious belief, issues of life, death and ultimate meaning as we in our communities of faith reflect upon and re-live the momentous events in first-century Palestine that we regard as foundational for our very identity. Here at the American Church in Paris we have however also been exploring such Big Questions from a scientific angle in the context of a series of evenings supported by the Templeton Foundation’s Scientists in Congregations Ministry Intiative, focusing on the dialogue between Christian theology and contemporary science. These culminated last week with three stimulating lectures by Oxford philosopher Prof. Keith Ward, the last of which also featured a lively round table discussion with Rev. George Hobson (Canon to the Bishop for Theological Education to the Anglican Diocese of Europe), the brilliant French polymath Jean Staune, and myself as in-house moderator.

Keith Ward is one of Britain’s most prolific theological writers both at the academic and popular level, author of a spate of recent books including Big Questions in Science in Religion, The Philosopher and the Gospels: Jesus through the Lens of Philosophy, Is Religion Irrational? and More over Matter. One of the most vociferous opponents of the New Atheism and singularly unafraid of being targeted by irate bloggers sniping in online forums hosted by the British press, Ward’s work is both consistently creative, uncommonly lucid and – something of a rarity for a professional philosopher – frequently highly entertaining.  Undaunted by current philosophical fads, he seems to have made a speciality of arguing, highly cogently if also often provocatively, for the rehabilitation of unfashionable figures from the classical philosophical tradition (Plato/Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel) and positions regarded by many as defunct. Perhaps the most counter-cultural of these is Ward’s commitment to philosophical Idealism, set out extensively in his More than Matter: What Humans Really Are, in which he contends that mind/consciousness, not materiality, is the ultimate metaphysical reality, and that the dimension of our existence linked with subjective experience (the inner life of thought, feeling, memory, notions of value and purpose) is not simply to be dismissed as an illusion generated by electrical activity in our brains. Here, Ward openly affirms his alignment with that most reviled of philosophical currents – Cartesian dualism:

‘Dualism, the original sin of Descartes, is not yet dead. Dualists can be found hiding in the philosophical undergrowth, slightly cowed perhaps, but still defiant. The heart of dualism, in the sense relevant to this discussion, is that mind and matter are two distinct sorts of thing. Minds do not exist in space, whereas matter is defined in terms of its location and extent in space. Minds think, feel, and perceive, and matter does not.’[1]

Some initial qualifications are perhaps in order here. Ward is not proposing a wholescale return to Descartes; you will not, for example, find him endorsing the French philosopher’s now infamous statement in Discours de la méthode that the goal of natural science is to make men[sic] ‘masters and possessors of nature’ [maîtres et possesseurs de la nature], which, as Jürgen Moltmann and others have shown, is an illegitimate extension of dualism which has had disastrous results in terms of the exploitation of the natural realm.[2] Ward is not proposing a ‘pure’ duality which would divorce mind and body entirely, nor is he arguing for a strict conceptual separation of human beings from a nature devoid of all subjectivity; rather, not unlike Teilhard de Chardin and Alfred North Whitehead, he espouses what he calls ‘dual-aspect idealism’. This is the idea that the material processes of evolution are the outworking of the potentialities of Mind which gives them their directionality: events have both an ‘outward physical appearance ‘ and an ‘inner aspect’ which is their ‘causal driving force’, leading them towards the realization of ‘consciously created and appreciated values’.[3]

‘The inner reality exists, but it could not exist fully and properly as it does without the outer expression. Materialism and idealism both err if they deny any existence to mind or to matter. Both must go together, but for an idealist the driving force of the whole process is in the end the mind-like, the conscious and the intentional, with its values and purposes. It is to that existence that the material cosmos points, and in which it finds the fulfilment of its inherent potentialities.’[4]

In this scheme, the world cannot be viewed as a mere aggregation of its material properties; any account of reality also needs to make room for the non-material considerations that make our conscious human experience meaningful. To illustrate this Ward uses two intriguing musical examples which are worth quoting; the first refers to the fact that music is not only sound in the sense of physical waves but heard sound – it is the element of human perception which allows us to talk about artistic beauty. Here, Ward insists, the factor of human consciousness leads us inevitably into the realm of non-physical emergent properties, an example of which might be a chord played by the orchestra in a Beethoven symphony. The only ‘physical stuff’ is ‘waves at a specific frequency whose physical properties can be specified accurately.[..] But when those waves hit the ear and get transmitted to the appropriate area of the brain, hey presto, a beautiful sound appears.’[5]

Conscious minds, Ward contends, perceive properties such as ‘specific timbre, pitch, and emotional tone’, which are meaningless terms in relation to unheard sound waves but are ‘non-physical’ properties which are intrinsically linked to the interaction of sound waves with our brains:

‘We say that some sounds are beautiful. But what we mean is that we experience them as beautiful. This new property of heard sound, with a pleasing or displeasing character, is not some new behavioural principle that applies to complex arrangements of fundamental particles, whether or not they are being perceived. It is an actual occurrent feeling of something being experienced as emotionally resonant.’[6]

In other words, Ward is arguing that aesthetic experience has a non-physical dimension; his contention might be made still more persuasive by adding that in the case of Beethoven’s final period, the mental element is even stronger, given that the composer’s deafness meant that sound waves played no part in the generation of the music. It can naturally be asserted that Beethoven’s aesthetic sense could not have arisen in the first place without his experience of such physical waves, but their subsequent internal memorization was such that music could be generated in the composer’s mind once the physical component of sound had become inaccessible to him.

Secondly, musical composition consists of endowing the physical properties of sound with structure and purpose in terms of the ordering of successive events, a factor that physics alone cannot explain. Ward illustrates this point by means of the musical example of a Brahms symphony; whilst admitting that such a work ‘can be fully expressed in the physical structure of a compact disc’ as binary digits, it is clear that the symphony is not reducible to numbers. As Keith Ward puts it, ‘a recital of the string of binary digits that make up the compact disc would not sound as attractive as hearing the symphony. Brahms was not trying to write strings of binary digits. He was trying to write beautiful music.’[7] This contrast between the symphony as an aesthetic sounding reality and its reduction to a mathematical pattern is seen by Ward as analogical to the irreducibility of our mental processes to neuronal firing. There is more to thinking than a succession of brain states, as the latter – if what we are talking about is essentially a combination of ‘on-off’ binary patterns, however complex – cannot on their own spontaneously generate, say, a logical argument.

To continue with Ward’s analogy, the idea that a coherent symphony could simply arise through a random self-assembly of ’1′s and ’0′s seems obviously ridiculous (here I might add that John Cage might well disagree, but he’s not Brahms): ‘If I suggest that the binary strings just organize themselves without even having any conception of what music is, and by chance they happen to play a Brahms symphony, it would be hard to take me seriously.’  The form of a symphony as a coherent structure implies a basis in artistic purpose. Ward compares this with what goes on in our brains if we try to solve an equation: the mental acts involved ‘can be translated into physical brain states, but it is the purposefully directed acts that decide the order in which brain states occur. Theydo not just put themselves into a certain order, which miraculously makes me argue in a correct deductive way.’ Just as the string of digits on a CD needs a CD-player to translate it back into a Brahms symphony, the neuronal firings ‘then have to be translated back into mathematical symbols, understood by a human mind to be an argument with premises and a conclusion.’ This is evidently something that the neurons on their own cannot achieve without the intervention of higher-order structuring:

‘The brain’s operations are all purely physical, but its structure, the ordering of its successive states in a logical argument, and the understanding that what has gone on is an argument, and not just a succession of physical states, are all non-physical.’[8]

Ward’s central contention, therefore, is that minds really do exist and cannot be reduced to their material substrate of the brain considered as ‘an electrochemically active lump of porridge’[9] (although mental activity is of course intimately correlated with the stirring of this sticky mixture). Clearly this is a broadside not only against his own teacher Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (a work which famously critiqued the ‘Cartesian myth’ of a ‘ghost in the machine’ in its attack on mind-body dualism), but against scientific materialism as represented by another of Ryle’s pupils, Daniel Dennett. So although only the final pages of More than Matter deal with overtly religious issues, the whole book should be seen against the backdrop of Ward’s more general concern to provide a rational Christian riposte to the reductionist agenda of the New Atheism. Here the humanities have a key role to play, the existence of art being bound up with questions of beauty and value which strike us as absolutely real but which cannot be explained away by purely physical accounts of reality. The fact that we consider them not to be wholly arbitrary would seem to be a strong pointer to their rootedness in purposeful creativity as an aspect of their ultimate metaphysical foundation:

‘the arts can be seen as participation in the creativity of the cosmos, in a power beyond the finite self that yet works through and can heighten the insights and skills of artistic endeavour. Great works of art, music, and literature will be disclosive of what George Steiner calls “real presence”, communications of transcendent mind as perceived by the immanent and embodied minds of human beings.’[10]

Jean Staune

In its stress on the non-physical aspect of reality, Ward’s thought converges strongly with that of Jean Staune (who himself gave an electrifying presentation in our series on March 8th), another prolific thinker no less courageously provocative than his Oxford counterpart, whose recent books Au-delà de Darwin, Notre existence a-t-elle un sens and La Science en Otage have generated considerable debate within France. Staune’s Platonic arguments for the existence of dimensions of reality not reducible to space-time, matter and energy in some respects resemble those of Ward – whose seminal Big Questions in Science and Religion was translated into French under Staune’s guidance – , but are primarily drawn from mathematics and experimental science rather than philosophical reasoning. Jean Staune’s current work, like Ward’s, sees scientific materialism as an inadequate paradigm requiring correction in terms of an appreciation of the role of rationally comprehensible structure in a natural order which cannot reasonably be considered as purely random. Staune focuses particularly on the evidence for the part played by natural laws in evolutionary development which appear to provide natural selection with a set of constraints leading to the repeated appearance of archetypal structures in nature[11], as well as phenomena such as quantum entanglement[12] which suggest  forms of non-local causality operative in the universe for which our current understanding of the laws of physics is insufficient.

In his emphasis on the huge implications for science of acknowledging the existence of non-local causation in the natural world, Staune in turn holds much in common with the Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, author of the recent Consciousness Beyond Life: the Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), which sold 100,000 copies in the first year of its publication in Dutch as Eindeloos Bewustzijn as well as being nominated in the Netherlands for Book of the Year in 2008. Like Staune and Ward, Van Lommel sets out a compelling case for a major revision of the dominant materialist scientific paradigm, having headed the first large-scale scientific study of near-death experiences (NDEs) to have its findings published in an internationally respected peer-reviewed journal (in a much-publicized article appearing in The Lancet in 2001 which is given much expanded treatment in Consciousness Beyond Life). Van Lommel is a pioneering researcher in a field which has hitherto been largely regarded as the preserve of devotees of parapsychology but which is rapidly moving into the scientific mainstream, being discussed at major gatherings such as the September 11, 2008 United Nations/Nour Foundation/Université de Montréal symposium, ‘Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness’. The strength of the arguments building in favour of a serious scientific appraisal of near-death experience is such that many feel that NDE research will in due time sound the death-knell of a reductionist materialist approach to the question of human consciousness.

In essence, what Van Lommel is arguing, similarly to other near-death researchers such as Bruce Greyson (Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia), Kenneth Ring (Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of Connecticut), Mario Beauregard (Neuroscience Research Center, Montreal University) and radiation oncologist Jeffrey Long, that there are compelling reasons to believe in the possibility of lucid consciousness on the part of persons in cardiac arrest whose electrical brain activity is recorded as totally flat by EEG measurement. If the considerable evidence put forward by Van Lommel receives the corroboration that many expect from current research programs such as Dr Sam Parnia’s AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) study at the University of Southampton, then the case made out for the irreducibility of mind to brain – or, to use religious categories, the existence of the ‘soul’ – by Keith Ward will be at the very least hugely strengthened, and perhaps even conclusively demonstrated.

For the moment it must be said that the majority of the evidence in favour of taking near-death experiences seriously is based on personal testimony. However, as Greyson, Van Lommel and Long variously point out, this testimony frequently contains elements which are open to verification (information provided NDErs regarding objects or events perceived while unconscious, both in the vicinity of their body and away from it, or concerning the identity of deceased relatives of whose existence they had been unaware prior to the NDE). It is therefore a legitimate object of scientific inquiry and should not be dismissed as purely subjective and therefore impossible to evaluate. Furthermore, following Keith Ward’s line of reasoning in More than Matter, an acknowledgement that some aspects of human experience are by their very nature irreducibly subjective would suggest that testimony should not be rejected out of hand as an evidential category, especially when, as I hope to show, NDE reports are highly convergent across geographical, cultural and temporal boundaries.

If it is suggested that the striking similarities between NDE accounts is an indication that all NDErs are simply repeating a stereotyped narrative (primarily centred around an experience of the interconnectedness of all things and an encounter with a ‘Being of Light’ radiating unconditional level) which could be nothing more than a cultural constructn, it is perhaps worth paying special attention to those accounts whose character is strikingly counter-intuitive in terms of their lack of correspondence both to their author’s prior expectations or metaphysical convictions.  And it is at this point that we need to return to just one such counter-intuitive report: the remarkable and gripping NDE found in the book My Descent into Death: a Second Chance at Life by Howard Storm to which I alluded in my previous post ‘Eyeless in Paris’. But beware: this is certainly one case where the reader should be prepared for a wild ride …

In the meantime, here are some resources which those interested in the contemporary debate concerning the mind-body relationship may find helpful:

• A number of presentations by Keith Ward are available online via the Gresham College website: http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/past?keys=&field_speakers_nid=1141&field_lecture_date[value][year]=&field_lecture_date[value][month]=&term_node_tid_depth=All . He can be heard discussing his idealist position with King’s College London Philosophy of Science Professor David Papinau in a podcast entitled ‘Is our Mind more than Matter’ at http://www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?mediaid={20C0C33D-2442-4C61-804D-89BDBC3434D0} A 25-minute interview with Prof. Ward conducted by Rev. Scott Herr, Genie Godula and myself on March 19 for the radio broadcast ‘ACP Today’ can be heard at http://www.frequenceprotestante.com/index.php?id=47&user_radio_pi1[program]=30832 (interview starts around 15:00).
• A France Culture interview (in French) with Jean Staune entitled ‘La science et la spiritualité, les progrès de la science’ recorded on March 18 can be heard at http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-les-racines-du-ciel-la-science-et-la-spiritualite-les-progres-de-la-science-avec-jean-staun
• A two-hour conversation with Pim van Lommel about his book Consciousness Beyond Life is accessible online at http://vimeo.com/24221473 ; a two-part video interview with Van Lommel conducted by Mel van Dusen can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOeLJCdHojU . His 2001 article for The Lancet can be downloaded as a pdf at http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~kiper/Van_Lommel.pdf
• Mario Beauregard discusses the current state of research into science and spirituality, as well as its reception by the scientific establishment, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgbXh9kPLU4 (recorded at the September 11, 2008 United Nations/Nour Foundation symposium, ‘Beyond the Mind-Body Problem: New Paradigms in the Science of Consciousness’). For Dr Beauregard’s views on near-death experience (in French), see http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9uplx_nde-l-explication-scientifique-du-d_tech
• A concise and helpful summary of some of the key issues in near-death research can be found in Bruce Greyson’s article entitled ‘Near-Death Experiences and Spirituality’ published in the leading science/religion journal Zygon (vol. 41/2, June 2006, 393-414), which can be downloaded as a pdf file at http://spiritualscientific.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/GreysonNDEandSpirituality.79194349.pdf Dr Greyson’s comments at the 2008 UN symposium are available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_qBIw7qyHU&feature=related or in more concise form at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kUyFeSizr0&feature=related
• Information on the AWARE study led by Dr Sam Parnia can be found at http://www.nourfoundation.com/events/Beyond-the-Mind-Body-Problem/The-Human-Consciousness-Project/the-AWARE-study.html
• Audio and transcripts of a large number of frank discussions featuring both prominent proponents and critics of the call for a revision of our understanding of the mind-body relationship in the light of near-death experience can be found at ‘Skeptiko’, the website of Alex Tsakiris which aims to be a source of ‘intelligent, hard-nosed skeptic vs. believer debate on science and spirituality’.: http://www.skeptiko.com/past-shows/ .

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NOTES

[1] Keith Ward, More than Matter: What Humans Really Are (Oxford: Lion, 2010), 112-113.

[2] ‘As long as the acquisition of power is the concern prompting the scientific search for knowledge, power will be the very mould in which the sciences are cast: power will be the actual form they take.[...]Moreover, through this method, the human being confronts nature from the outset and in principle as its ruler. He is no longer one member of the community of creation; he confronts creation as its lord and owner.[...] The Cartesian dualism of res cogitans and res extensa is the theory that prompts this modern process of differentiation between man and nature, and the purposes behind that process’ (Jürgen Moltmann, God and Creation: a New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993),  27).

[3] Keith Ward, More than Matter, 102-103.

[4] Ibid., 136.

[5] Ibid., 114.

[6] Ibid..

[7] Ibid., 144.

[8] Ibid., 145.

[9] Ibid..

[10] Ibid., 190.

[11] See Notre existence a-t-elle un sens and Au-delà de Darwin, passim.. Staune and Ward both draw on Cambridge paleontologist Simon Conway Morris’s pioneering work in the field of ‘evolutionary convergence’ (see Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: CUP, 2003)), the idea that the laws of nature provide evolutionary processes with directionality by steering them towards certain solutions such as the camera eye which arise repeatedly in evolutionary history in organisms in a way that cannot be entirely explained by their common ancestry.

[12] Staune’s Notre existence a-t-elle un sens originally contained a chapter on near-death experience which was subsequently not included out of a desire to restrict discussion to topics where the scientific evidence is uncontestable, which is not yet the case for NDE research. However, Staune’s text on the subject has been published (in French) on his website: http://www.staune.fr/Un-pas-de-l-autre-cote-de-la.html as a stimulus to further investigation.

Rowan Williams – End of an era

So, the news is just in that Rowan Williams will be stepping down as Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of this year … Whatever his detractors may say about his tenure and the painful controversies in which he may have found himself entangled (the majority not of his own making), Rowan Williams surely remains one of the giants of contemporary theology. Moving, like NT Wright not long ago, back into the somewhat quieter waters of British academic life (as Master of Magdalene College Cambridge) from the turbulence of Church politics, it is only to be hoped that the loss in terms of leadership of the Anglican Communion will be scholarship’s gain. And who knows – maybe somebody might even be able to persuade him to help out a theologically-minded composer or two as he did as the consultant  for James MacMillan and his librettist Michael Symmons Roberts during the creation of their Parthenogenesis, part of Jeremy Begbie’s Theology Through the Arts project which is now based at Duke University under the name Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts.

For those who are long-time fans of ‘The Bearded One’ (as some of my North American theo-friends refer to him), it is perhaps worth pointing out just some of the rich audio and video resources available on the internet which provide ample evidence that whatever toll his time at Lambeth Palace may have taken on him, Rowan Williams’ theological insight remains both as sharp and as profound as ever:

‘The Finality of Christ in a pluralist world’ - in this lecture given at Guildford Cathedral in 2010, the Archbishop offers what has to rank as one of the most cogent recent suggestions for how to reconcile a robust commitment to the core of historical Christian orthodoxy with an authentic respect for other religious traditions.

‘The Image of Humanity in the Philokalia’ - the 2010 Father Alexander Schmemann Lecture given at St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, NY. A reminder of the extent to which Rowan Williams’ vision has been deeply shaped by the traditions of the Eastern Church (both ancient and modern), as well as of his contribution to the understanding of the Eastern Orthodox heritage in the West.

‘Emerging Church Expression’ - in a quite different vein, a video sampler of the DVD accompanying the highly stimulating Church in the Present Tense: A Candid Look at What’s Emerging by Scot McKnight, Peter Rollins, Kevin Corcoran and Jason Clark (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2011). Especially recommended to those who may not know that the Archbishop has for a number of years been one of the staunchest supporters of the Emergent Church in an Anglican context (‘Fresh Expressions’).

‘The nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin’ - video of the recent debate moderated by Sir Anthony Kenny between Rowan Williams and Richard Dawkins at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford this February. May disappoint those expecting gladiatorial combat, but is likely to go down in the annals as a model of respectful but substantial engagement between two very different viewpoints about the essential nature of humanity.

On a more personal note, one of the most thought-provoking of the many books by the outgoing Archbishop remains for me his short but grippingly dense series of ‘reflections on art and love’ entitled Grace and Necessity (London: Continuum, 2005), a haunting set of meditations on artistic creativity which probably has more underlinings per page than any virtually other item on my shelves. At a music and spirituality conference at the London South Bank Centre in 2008 I attempted a musical transposition of some of Rowan Williams’ ideas (centred on the thought of the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain) in a paper entitled ‘The Necessity of Grace’. Although some of my comments regarding the post-modern philosophical revival of interest in the via negativa of apophatic theology would probably receive some nuancing were I to update it, I offer the essay to any interested readers here as a pdf for want of any better way to mark what is definitely the end of an era.

The power and the poet

As I am writing the Russian Federation is about to vote in presidential elections that have had many Western observers wondering in the light of recent pro-democracy protests whether the nation might be on the verge of a ‘Russian Spring’ ushering in a new era of political pluralism. To the disappointment of many, it now seems fairly clear that the white ribbons of the opposition are about to lose out to the red, white and blue of Vladimir Putin, but one of the interesting subplots of a campaign that now lacks suspense is the way in which it has evidently divided the post-Soviet musical elite.

Anna Netrebko and Vladimir Putin, 2004

On one hand, much electronic ink has been spilled over the vocal support for the Russian Prime Minister recently offered by Anna Netrebko (which caused something of a cultural furore in Vienna where the diva resides). I will refrain from commenting on Netrebko’s er… extremely candid remarks of admiration for Putin in Newsweek out of a concern not to turn this into a tabloid blog, although any reader concerned about the incursion of trash-TV culture into classical music would find much food for thought in the soprano’s interview. La Netrebko can scarcely be looked to as a source of meaningful political comment, but what is more perplexing is the fact that Vladimir Putin’s YouTube channel has also just posted serious video endorsements from artists of the stature of Valery Gergiev and Yuri Bashmet, with the latter waxing lyrical about a future Putin presidential tenure as being comparable to Stradivarius’s ‘golden period’ in his career as a violin-maker.

One of the most impressive collaborations between Bashmet and Gergiev is arguably their Deutsche Grammophon release of Styx, a powerful Viola Concerto written by Giya Kancheli in 1999. And it is in considering the Kancheli-Gergiev relationship that the parting of the ways in the musical elite of the former Soviet Union becomes both obvious and poignant, reflecting the tragic dimension of events in the ex-USSR over the last decade or so. A long-term collaborator of Gergiev’s, Kancheli wrote a piece entitled ‘Ouarzon’ specially for the Ossetian maestro’s 50th birthday in 2003, with the following dedication (reproduced in the transcript of a 2008 Radio Free Europe conversation with Kancheli which can be read in an English version here or heard in the original Russian via this link).

“Dear Valery,

“Our creative and personal relationship, which has endured many years, has filled me with hope that the powerful energy you possess will travel the globe and return, like a boomerang, to the symbolic circle Bertolt Brecht called ‘the chalk circle of the Caucasus.’ This piece, which I have dedicated to you, I named an Ossetian word, ‘Ouarzon,’ which means ‘love.’ When I transcribed this word in Latin letters it turned out, to my surprise, that it sounds like ‘war zone.’ Unfortunately, this transcription reflects the reality of events transpiring in the Caucasus . It is commonly known that the difference between love and the creation of a ‘war zone’ is just one poorly thought-out step. The way back, on the other hand, is long and difficult.

“I embrace you,

“Giya Kancheli”

However, in the course of this emotionally-charged interview it rapidly becomes clear that after the 2008 Russian-Georgian conflict in South Ossetia the relationship between two of the greatest post-Soviet musicians broke down, the cause of contention being Gergiev’s much-publicized concert in Tskhinvali with his Marinsky Theatre Orchestra in gratitude for the Russian intervention against what he (contrary to Kancheli) regarded as the naked aggression of the Georgian army. Tragically, where Gergiev would speak of the military action of Tbilisi as equivalent to a ’9/11′ event, Kancheli would use precisely the same metaphor in reverse concerning the occupation of Georgian soil by Russian troops.

Giya Kancheli has since become associated with the musical opposition to the present Kremlin authorities, particularly in joining his voice to that of Arvo Pärt[1] and Gidon Kremer in support of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, about which I have already written on the pages of this blog. In July 2011, Kancheli’s ‘V & V’ for taped voice and violin was the opening item in the ‘Musica Liberat’ concert on behalf of Russia’s two most famous prisoners given by Kremerata Baltica in Strasbourg , with participating musical heavyweights including Pärt, Evgeny Kissin (in duo with Martha Argerich), Mischa Maisky and the former Lithuanian head of state, composer Vytautas Landsbergis, proceeds being donated to the Podmoskovny orphanage and boarding school in Koralovo founded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 1994 and adminstered by his family. The programme, organized in collaboration with Amnesty International, ‘Memorial’ (founded by Andrei Sakharov) and Human Rights Watch, was preceded by a keynote speech by Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. On the same day an article by Gidon Kremer highly critical of Putin’s treatment of Khodorkovsky appeared via CNN in which the violinist quoted Pushkin:

‘To answer Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s cynical pronouncement that “a thief must sit in jail,” I would like to offer lines from the great Pushkin:And to the nation long shall I be dear For having with my lyre evoked kind feelings, Exalted freedom in my cruel age And called for mercy toward the downfallen.

A familiar Russian theme — the power and the poet. It was always rare for the two to be found on the same podium.’

Mischa Maisky

It is perhaps no coincidence to see artistic opposition to the present Russian régime being led by musicians born in those countries who felt the full brunt of Soviet repression – Georgia (Kancheli) and the Baltic States: Estonia (Pärt), Latvia (Kremer, Maisky) and Lithuania (Landsbergis) -, who understand the workings of centralized Muscovite power only too well and who feel the responsibility to sound the alarm at signals of a repeat of authoritarian history in a new capitalist guise. These artists also all live outside Russian jurisdiction (including Evgeny Kissin who is based in Paris) and can therefore speak freely without the fear of government recriminations. An organized musical opposition within Russia itself seems not to exist at the moment, as Alex Ross has recently noted ; certainly its isolated voices lack the means to generate anything comparable to Putin’s list of 499 high-profile campaign ‘trustees’ such Netrebko and Gergiev. The more worrying long-term question for Russian democracy – to which hints of an answer, and not necessarily comforting ones, may be given tomorrow – is not whether such a opposition grouping does exist, but whether it can exist. As Gidon Kremer reminds us, Russian power has a long track record of using the podium for one-men shows.

NOTE

[1] March 2nd saw the first British airing at the London Institute of Contemporary Art of Cyril Tuschi’s film ‘Khodorkhovsky’ first shown in Berlin in 2011 (almost having been derailed when Tuschi’s final cut was the object of what the director described as a highly ‘professional’ theft on the eve of its first screening), with Arvo Pärt’s Symphony n.4 – dedicated to Khodorkovsky, Lebedev ‘and all imprisoned without rights in Russia’ providing the soundtrack. A video statement by Arvo Pärt concerning the Khodorkovsky case (in Russian) can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6eROXjSOeM&feature=related

Eyeless in Paris

One of the periodic delights of living in Paris is the experience of showing visitors around this sometimes infuriating but undoubtedly stunning city. As with any great metropolis, it is all too easy to be made oblivious to Paris’s exceptional cultural richness by the daily routine of what is classically termed métro-boulot-dodo. Until, that is, you find yourself sharing the sights with those who are not so blasé about this incredible location for lovers of history and art. So it was with a properly renewed sense of wonder that we returned home after visiting two of Paris’s most astounding locations with family guests from the other side of the Eurotunnel .

The first was the renovated Musée d’Orsay, perhaps the world’s most concentrated collection of epoch-making visual art from the period 1848-1914; for anyone who knows even a little about the history of painting there is a sense of sheer overload in being in an enclosed space with so many masterpieces of figures such as Corot, Manet, Monet, Dégas, Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh …, any one of which would be the pièce de résistance in a lesser museum. It is not merely that the Orsay’s canvases are supremely beautiful in purely aesthetic terms, but also that each one carries rich human associations as a chronicle of the lived historical experience of an era. As the philosopher John D. Caputo (perhaps the foremost living Anglophone interpreter of what he terms the philosophical ‘witch-doctors’ of the Parisian rive gauche) likes to remark, something is ‘getting itself said’ through this art which goes beyond the purely personal vision of the artist.

To use another philosophical parallel, there is a sense when standing in front of the paintings in the Musée d’Orsay of what Jean-Luc Marion has famously called a ‘saturated phenomenon’, something which overwhelms our cognitive capacities by its excess, its sheer weight of what might be termed ‘radiance’ or ‘splendour’, to give a rough translation of the word Herrlichkeit which was so central to the thought of Jean-Luc Marion’s theological mentor Hans Urs von Balthasar.

For me perhaps the best exemplification of this in the Orsay is Van Gogh’s unforgettable Nuit étoilée sur le Rhône, painted in Arles in 1888, which makes an impact when seen in the museum which is quite different from anything that can be conveyed by a reproduction of the picture. The sheer intensity of what one might call Van Gogh’s ‘meta-colours’ and the unbelievable thickness of the paint create the impression of what the Welsh 17th century poet Henry Vaughan famously described in his Night as a ‘deep and dazzling darkness’ which is more than simply physical and which evokes something akin to a state of mystical consciousness.

Vincent van Gogh 'Nuit Etoilée sur le Rhône', 1888

Our appreciation of a sense of the numinous within Van Gogh’s Provençal night sky is obviously bolstered by our biographical knowledge of the painter’s profound spirituality (which I already discussed in relation to Makoto Fujimura’s provocative reading of his other ‘Starry Night’ picture in my post ‘Fujimura’s Refracted Light’ ). Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of the ‘saturated phenomenon’ can however also be powerfully felt in wholly ‘secular’ pictures such as Monet’s light-drenched series of views of the Japanese bridge in the garden at Giverny. Interestingly, Marion himself, in his highly thought-provoking reflections on visual art published as La Croisée du visible, interprets Monet’s form of saturation in anti-metaphysical terms, as a reduction of painting to the data of immediate consciousness, excluding  any other ‘object’, i.e. subject-matter. This is most apparent in his reading of Monet’s studies of the façade of Rouen Cathedral, in which the object is evidently not the cathedral but the play of light itself as experienced by the painter:

‘The portal of Rouen Cathedral does not appear differently lit during the course of the same day; on the contrary, even at high noon, it never stops disappearing; and less so by dazzlement (éblouissement) than by virtue of being all too perfectly recorded. To talk of dazzlement implies that one is constantly aiming at an object and therefore regrets that the excess of light prohibits a clear view, but here it is not a matter of seeing, through the excess of light, the intended object of a cathedral. It is about receiving this light itself, as perceived, in the place of and instead of any illuminated objective.’[1]

I can certainly understand Marion’s take on Monet’s Rouen series, in which it is additionally evident (a point so obvious that Marion does not even comment on it directly, although it reinforces his general interpretive line) that the whole spiritual significance of the Cathedral and the sculptures on its facade is of no interest to the painter whatsoever. Here the contrast between Monet and the symbolist school of French 19th century art is very striking in terms of the way in which the relationship between the visible and the invisible is approached; Marion defines impressionism’s fascination with light and shade as making the invisible (i.e. the medium of vision) visible at the expense of the object itself, which is effectively collapsed into the perception of the artist who is no longer trying to see anything ‘behind’ what is perceived by immediate consciousness. In other words, Marion claims that such painting does not point to anything beyond itself – Monet therefore both epitomizes and to some extent triggers modern art’s tendency to demolish any reference to a transcendent depth other than what is immediately perceptible. To this Marion opposes the Biblical and early Christian tradition of the icon, whose essence is to turn the viewer’s attention away from itself to its invisible prototype, the paradigmatic case being Christ as the eikon of God, the suffering servant of Isaiah 52-53 who allows himself to be disfigured in order to draw us to the Father.[2]

However, returning to Monet’s Japanese bridge, it could be argued that a somewhat different interpretation is also possible. In contrast to what are to my mind the predominantly technical, if impressive, explorations of the pointillists such as Seurat and Signac, Monet’s paintings should surely not be regarded as devoid of depth. I for one (albeit bringing my own world-view and prior experience with me to the Musée d’Orsay) would be more inclined to say that regardless of Monet’s own atheism, the saturation with light emanating from his canvases can strike the spectator as a powerful form of this-worldly transcendence endowed with its own sense of mystery and depth even if there is no reference to anything beyond an ‘immanent frame’, to use Charles Taylor’s useful term when discussing the historical process of secularization in Western culture. I can agree with Marion that the ‘medium of vision’ does take precedence over subject-matter, and symbolic reference is nowhere to be found, but there is still ‘dazzlement’ – as Marion himself admits – to the extent that light itself has been elevated to transcendent status. This is not a simple case of ‘disenchantment’, not a full-blown attack on transcendence per se such as can be found, say, in Manet’s coldly lit Olympia (as I discussed in relation to Jacques Ellul’s insightful interpretation of Manet in The Empire of Non-Sense ).[3]

Claude Monet, 'Le Bassin aux Nymphéas' (Princeton University Art Museum)

__________________

This concept of dazzlement/éblouissement , explored theologically in a manner very similar to that of Marion, also appears in the writings of the composer Olivier Messiaen. In a lecture given in Notre-Dame de Paris in December 1977 he uses it to convey his intuition of a link between colour and religious experience, referring to the second mythical location which we visited last weekend, the Sainte Chapelle built by Louis IX in the 13th century, of which I highly recommend taking a virtual tour that you can access by clicking here . Messiaen first encountered its iridescent windows when he was 10 years old, an experience which he describes as foundational -

‘What is going on in the stained glass of Bourges [Cathedral], the great windows of Chartres, in the rose windows of Notre-Dame de Paris and in the marvelous, incomparable stained-glass of the Sainte Chapelle? Firstly there is a host of figures, large and small, telling us the life of Christ, of the Blessed Virgin, the Prophets and the Saints: a sort of catechism in images. This catechism is enclosed in circles, heraldic shields, trefois; it obeys colour symbolism, it contrasts, superimposes, decorates, teaches, with a thousand intentions and a thousand details. Well, from far away, without binoculars, without ladders, without anything to aid our weak eyes, we see nothing: just a totally blue, green or purple stained-glass window. We don’t understand, we are dazzled.

‘God dazzles us with an excess of Truth’, says St Thomas Aquinas.’[4]

Stained-glass, Sainte-Chapelle

Messiaen goes so far as to describe his experience of dazzlement, which he closely links to the phenomenon of synaesthesia (the simultaneous perception of sound and colour), as a ‘breakthrough towards the beyond’ (‘percée vers l’au-delà’). The humbling of our senses and our understanding that we feel in the presence of overwhelming sensory beauty opens us, Messiaen contends, to the transcendent reality of God:

‘All these forms of dazzlement are a great lesson. They show us that God is above words, thoughts, concepts, above our earth and our sun, above the thousands of stars around us, above and outside time and space, all these things which are as it were attached to Him. [...] And when musical painting, coloured music, sound-colour [le son-couleur] magnify him through dazzlement, they participate in the beautiful praise of the Gloria, saying to God and Christ: “You alone are Holy, You alone are the Most High!” On inaccessible heights. In so doing, they help us to live better, better to prepare our death, better to prepare our resurrection from the dead and the new life which awaits us. They are an excellent “passage-way”, an excellent “prelude” to the unsayable and the invisible.’[5]

Messiaen’s lecture concludes by an affirmation of hope in the Beatific Vision in the risen life, which will be ‘a perpetual dazzlement, an eternal music of colours, an eternal colour of musics’.[6]

_______________

Eight years after Messiaen made his remarks, an art professor named Howard Storm was visiting Paris with a group of his students from Northern Kentucky University. An atheist for whom the only contact with spirituality was his own artistic experience of the mysterious variability of ‘inspiration’ from one day to the next, he would later recall finding himself strangely overcome with emotion on seeing both the Sainte Chapelle and the Monet water-lilies in the Orangerie of the Tuileries gardens. However, on that 1985 trip Howard Storm would unexpectedly find himself undergoing a life-changing liminal experience (recounted in his book My Descent into Death: a Second Chance at Life) which, as we will see in the next portion of this post, would not only provide him with a stunning personal confirmation of Messiaen’s words in Notre-Dame de Paris concerning the ‘eternal music of colours’, but which is now regarded by many as one of the most dramatic near-death experiences in modern times …

NOTES

[1] Jean-Luc Marion, La Croisée du Visible (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 32. Translation mine.

[2] ‘The question can be formulated as follows: where, originally, can an image be found which divests itself of its own visibility in order to let another gaze break through it? The answer is clear: the Servant of Yahweh allows himself literally to be disfigured (to lose the visible splendour of his own face) in order to do the will of God (which only appears in his actions). The Servant sacrifices his face – he allows his ‘image’ to be unmade: ‘there were many who were appalled at him – his appearance was so disfigured … his form marred beyond human likeness’ (Isaiah 52:14; cf. Psalm 22:7). By effacing all glory from his own face to the point of obscuring his very humanity, the Servant allows nothing to be seen of him other than his acts, the latter resulting from obedience to the will of God and thus allowing it to be made manifest’ (ibid., 109. Translation mine).le

[3] The closest musical parallel to Monet in this respect is perhaps not Debussy, whose frequent association with ‘impressionism’ is misleading to the extent that it obscures his alignment with symbolist currents (particularly evident in Pelléas et Mélisande), but Frederick Delius, who lived in the French village of Grez-sur-Loing near Fontainebleau from 1897 to 1934 together with his German painter wife Jelka. Notoriously opposed to Christianity and an avowed disciple of Nietzsche, Delius’s music is provocatively anti-theistic but remains ‘spiritual’ in a similar fashion to the ‘transcendentalism’ of figures such as Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass provided the text for Delius’s haunting Sea Drift (1903-4).

[4] Olivier Messiaen, Conférence de Notre-Dame (Paris: Leduc, 1978), 12.  Translation mine.

[5] Ibid., 13.

[5] Ibid., 15.

A ‘new spiritual music’?

Today I was forwarded a link to an article by Ivan Hewett which has just appeared in the British Daily Telegraph previewing this weekend’s BBC Symphony Orchestra ‘Total Immersion’ event celebrating the prolific output of Jonathan Harvey, held up by Hewett (quite rightly) as one of the most substantial composers of recent decades writing music with overtly spiritual themes, drawn both from Abrahamic and Eastern religious traditions.

Hewett for example writes of the way that Harvey’s Towards a Pure Land managed to dissolve his own ‘atheist’s scepticism’ by means of his ‘brilliant way of symbolising an existence beyond this one’, evoking the way that, even after the end of Harvey’s score, a ‘constant, mysterious chord’ seems somehow to linger which suggests ‘the “harmonious silence of heaven” (here Hewett is quoting Messiaen, one of Harvey’s main influences). He finds himself equally captivated by Harvey’s Tranquil Abiding – for which I fully share the article’s enthusiasm -, in which ‘we hear a colossal yet gentle back-and-forth movement between two radiantly consonant chords, which picture a universe breathing in a way analogous to ourselves’.

So far so good. Jonathan Harvey is indeed a supremely imaginative and wide-ranging composer of the first order whose work compels admiration for its immense technical accomplishment, stylistic variety and conceptual scope (one recent piece which I very much intend to acquaint myself being his large-scale Weltethos to texts of the Swiss Catholic theologian and ethicist Hans Küng, whom I had the great privilege of meeting in 2009 at the Global Humanitarian Forum in Geneva, behind which Prof. Küng is a driving force).

However, the article also seems to have provoked something of a storm on Facebook among several of my compositional friends and colleagues from the US to Estonia (who are demonstrating a laudable sense of collegiality in their reactions), as it begins with a forthright and unmitigated attack on what Hewett perceives as the ‘noxious blend of nostalgia and narcosis’ that passes for contemporary ‘spirituality’ in music:

Much of this music makes my heart sink. For one thing, it tries to raise us up by looking back. In its desperate efforts to be timeless, it simply sounds old-fashioned.’

Hewett does make a valid point in asserting that all good music (whether Cole Porter, Tallis or Haydn) is in a sense ‘spiritual’ in that it defies the mechanical ticking of the clock, aligns our being with its dancing motion, and gives us a delicious sense of being freed from tedious rationality.’ His intuition is that it is the inherent characteristics of music as a sounding phenomenon, rather than the presence of an overtly sacred text, which is the primary source of its spirituality – an approach with which I can certainly sympathize and which is not incompatible with much of what I have been suggesting on this blog in recent months. What is highly problematic, however, is the article’s caricatural and hugely generalized notion of a supposed ‘new spiritual music’, a category to which Eric Whitacre, John Rutter(?!), Gabriel Jackson and John Tavener all purportedly belong despite the enormous stylistic differences between them.

There are perhaps two grains of truth here – i) the epithet ‘new spiritual music’ may be an artificial construct, but the phenomenon it is attempting to describe is real. There is definitely a growing constituency of listeners who are reacting against much of late Western modernity’s attempt to belittle, if not simply eradicate, all notions of a spiritual dimension to human beings (especially in an increasingly technological society) and ii) this audience has inevitably been targeted (and arguably manipulated) over the last 20 years or so by marketing strategists intending to cash in on the success of works such as Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Where the article’s diatribe is misplaced and grossly unfair, however, is in laying the blame for ‘nostalgia and narcosis’ with the composers of this music rather than certain distribution channels primarily interested in an enticing commercial opportunity and prepared to smooth out many of the most interesting features of the works of figures such as Górecki for the sake of supposed palatability with a mass Western audience in mind.

For example, it should be patently obvious to anyone familiar with the trajectory of his career that John Tavener’s work cannot be reduced to simple nostalgia, an invocation of Byzantium in a ‘desperate effort to be timeless’. To call such music ‘old-fashioned’ is to fail completely to understand its creative retrieval of the ancient as a post-modern critique of certain pathologies of Western modernity. This retrieval is at the heart of what Eastern Orthodox theology calls the ‘neo-patristic synthesis’ of ‘going forward with the Fathers’ (to quote George Florovsky, the most eminent contemporary exponent of this line of thought being John Zizioulas) or what is called ressourcement in Catholicism. To conceive of music iconically is not merely a question of what Hewett refers to as ‘atavistic drones and chants’ but to re-conceptualize basic ideas about musical aesthetics by embracing a contemplative, receptive mode of engaging with music which has profound spiritual implications.

As for Gabriel Jackson, his output may be somewhat conservative for some tastes, but his sensitive and extremely well-crafted choral music has attracted considerable attention from groups such as Donald Nally’s The Crossing who are equally comfortable with pieces such as James Dillon’s Nine Rivers and can hardly be accused either of nostalgic sentimentality or a dependency on musical opiates. To say that bracketing it with John Rutter is tendentious is to put it mildly.

To assess the output of such composers according to the same criteria as one might apply to Harvey or Messiaen is surely a mistake, in that it fails to recognize that the compositional means employed are so different as to make comparison well-nigh impossible. It has always seemed to me to be a far sounder strategy for music critics to evaluate works according to their degree of success in meeting their own objectives, which of course requires that those objectives first be understood before judgement is passed. Yes, there is and will always be superficial, badly-constructed and frankly opportunistic music around, and new sacred composition is no exception. And yes, there is something particularly distasteful about the instrumentalization of ‘spirituality’ in order to shift product. But the ‘new spiritual music’ as portrayed in the article is definitely a straw man.

Above all, the approach of attempting to play off Jonathan Harvey against the ‘noxious’ spiritual smorgasbord which the article’s author deplores strikes me as ill-advised. This is not a zero-sum game. It is perfectly possible to appreciate a wide variety of forms of musical evocations of the sacred, to be a fan of Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte and a Silvestrov Litany, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge and Eriks Esenvalds’ A drop in the ocean, Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron and John Tavener’s The Tyger. So let us by all means celebrate the remarkable achievement of Jonathan Harvey, but without thinking that his reputation is served by negative references to others who may be striving to express the same sense of transcendence by other means. Can we not, to quote Olivier Messiaen, see them as parts of ‘the same reality, seen from different angles’?

Why theology doesn’t know what to do with Gustav Mahler

Every so often you receive snippets of information that make you jealous as a musician. Today was a case in point; just as I was about to start writing this post, I read a brief Facebook jotting from my Dutch musicologist friend Marcel Zwitser that read ‘Enjoyed a two and a half hours rehearsal of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Mariss Jansons for the upcoming New Year’s Concert in the Musikvereinsaal in Vienna this afternoon. Gorgeous’. Very timely, as my thoughts for the last couple of days have been very much in Vienna and with that orchestra; I made a resolution that before the year is out I would try to write something on this year’s Mahler centenary, and I’m determined to keep it. However, I do so with not a little fear and trembling, not merely because of the vastness of the literature on the composer and the complexity of his work, but also because when it comes to Mahler, it is hard to avoid the feeling that the most important word of all is ‘ambiguity’. As with few if any composers before him, Mahler’s work has given rise to diametrically opposed interpretations, depending not least on whether one thinks he is speaking with or without quotation marks, sincerely or ironically. As we shall see, this is particularly problematic when it comes to trying to find one’s way out of the labyrinth of his complex and shifting metaphysical views.

Gustav Mahler, 1909

Closure without resolution

A courageous recent attempt at theological dialogue with Mahler can be found in the essay ‘Musical Time and Eschatology’ by Alastair Borthwick, Trevor Hart and the late Anthony Monti in the collection Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology; in this stimulating article on the parallels between musical process and theological conceptualizations of the Last Things, the authors turn to Mahler’s ‘eschewing of strong authentic cadences’ which they see as ‘a natural musical parable for a similarly “strong” and satisfying end to the world and its history.’ Their purpose in examining Mahler is to make the bold claim that his creative, non-cadential solutions to the problem of how to attain musical closure without the kind of straightforward resolution favoured in classical tonal music ‘can model an alternative kind of eschatological “closure” entirely consonant with the wider shape of Christian hope.’[1] Such a hope, they assert, neither degenerates into modernity’s discredited myth of progress nor resigns itself to the ultimate futility of the world, but posits an open, dynamic future in which possibilities are never exhausted.

The chief example chosen to illustrate this point is the remarkable ending of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which the authors aptly describe as a ‘the end point of a process of fragmentary dissolution that fades into silence’, quoting Leonard Bernstein’s opinion that this is ‘a sonic presentation of death itself …which paradoxically reanimates us every time we hear it.’[2] To support this affirmative interpretation, they point to Mahler’s brief instrumental citation of a melodic fragment from his Kindertötenlieder, which is accompanied in the song-cycle by the words ‘O be not afraid. The day is beautiful. They [the dead children of Friedrich Rückert’s poems] are only on their way to yonder height’, contending that Mahler’s ending can be read as pointing not to death as a full-stop, but to a life whose future is left mysteriously open by the symphony’s refusal of an unambiguous conclusion:

‘Mahler’s gestures of closure suggest […] that “completion need not imply an ending.” Rather, completion may suggest an opening out onto that which is without end or limit – that is, onto infinity or, better perhaps, the transcendent future of God’s promise.’[3]

This is undoubtedly a highly creative and theologically fertile interpretation, in that the chief aim of the article is to argue (following both Gregory of Nyssa and Jürgen Moltmann) for an eschatology which is neither simply the telos of the historical process of the world, nor a ‘state of static timelessness’, and for a life beyond death which ‘is not a world where we finally “arrive” and all loose ends are tied, but instead is one of infinite progression into the unfathomable mystery of God.’ [4] To the extent that the ending of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is radically open and does indeed function as a singular evocation of a deep mystery, their point is certainly well-made. Moreover, Borthwick, Hart and Monti are surely pursuing a fruitful line of inquiry in seeing the questioning, open-ended Mahler – who has always struck me personally as being at his most ‘truthful’ when refusing easy solutions – as offering more fertile territory for theological reflection on the nature of eternity than the rousingly affirmative conclusions of his Second and Eighth Symphonies, via which the composer has often been co-opted into something resembling a traditional Christian framework (a mistaken interpretation which is dispelled by anything more than a superficial reading of the works’ texts). The authors of the article are perhaps wise to avoid theological appeals to these two symphonies; for all their undeniably thrilling moments – and I say this while still counting myself as fervent an admirer as any of the Second Symphony – the aspect of public celebration in both seems to render these two works, like all artistic apotheoses, vulnerable to ideological appropriation of the most dubious sort.

Ticket for the first performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Munich, September 12, 1910

A perceptive recent study by Carl Niekerk focusing particularly on Mahler’s Jewishness has underlined this by pointing out that the performance of the Second and Eighth Symphonies in 1936 on the 25th anniversary of Mahler’s death by the Vienna Philharmonic can plausibly be construed as part of an attempt to make the composer acceptable to a ‘deeply Catholic, autocratic, anti-parliamentarian Austrofascist regime that envisioned a state modeled after Mussolini’s Italy’ and whose chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg was a close friend both of Alma Mahler and Bruno Walter.[5] This historical observation would appear to vindicate the trenchant critique levelled at the  Eighth Symphony by Theodor Adorno in 1960, in which he pinpoints the undeniable element of self-glorification in the work’s deliberate conflation of the Holy Spirit and the Zeitgeist :

‘The magnum opus is the aborted, objectively impossible resuscitation of the cultic. It claims not only to be a totality in itself, but to create one in its sphere of influence [...] In reality it worships itself. The spirit that names the Hymn in the Eighth as such as degenerated to tautology, to a mere duplication of itself, while the gesture of sursum corda underlines the claim to be more.’[6]

Mahler’s Eighth, claims Adorno somewhat cruelly but not unjustifiably, mistakes the Spirit for itself in a way which is typical of its epoch; ‘it confuses art and religion, under the sway of a false consciousness that extends from Die Meistersinger to Pfitzner’s Palestrina, and to which the philosophical conceptions of Schoenberg, the man with Die glückliche Hand, the chosen one of Die Jakobsleiter, are also subject. Like no other composer of his time, Mahler was sensitive to collective shocks. The temptation that arose from this, to glorify the collective that he felt sounding through him as an absolute, was almost overwhelming. That he did not resist it is his offense.’[7]

Veni Creator Spiritus, opening

Typically irreligious?

While the gist of Borthwick’s, Hart’s and Monti’s argument (that ‘open’ models of God’s future are ultimately more hopeful than ‘closed’ ones) strikes me as theologically attractive, their use of Mahler to illustrate their case makes me more than a little nervous from a historical and musicological standpoint. The basic problem with attempting to annex the dénouement of the Ninth Symphony to notions of the ‘transcendent future of God’s promise’ is that this overlooks the possibility that the concept of infinity can also be construed pantheistically; the ‘yonder height’ beyond this life can equally well be interpreted as the liberating dissolution of the individual into the Weltall. Furthermore, an examination of the historical background to Mahler’s work demonstrates that to interpret it in non-theistic terms is by no means a fanciful hermeneutical move, as it is well-known that the composer’s major philosophical influences included several thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the panpsychist Siegfried Lipiner who can hardly be seen as congenial to traditional forms of Christian doctrine.

As Niekerk argues persuasively on the basis of a detailed analysis of Mahler’s literary sources, the biographical evidence against any attribution of a traditional metaphysical outlook (whether Christian or Jewish) to Mahler is considerable.[8] What seems far more plausible is to see Mahler as the prototypical ‘spiritual but not religious’ composer, turning to art as a substitute for religious practice, with music being the vehicle for what might be termed a ‘postmetaphysical’, non-dogmatic piety in which the search for transcendence is not so much abandoned as collapsed into an ‘immanent frame’, to use a useful term from the eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s reading of the long-term emergence of ‘A Secular Age’. Otto Klemperer’s description of the composer in his memoirs captures this essential ambivalence towards religious belief: ‘Mahler was a thorough-going child of the nineteenth century, an adherent of Nietzsche and typically irreligious. For all that, he was – as all his compositions testify – devout in the highest sense,’ though his piety was ‘not to be found in any church prayer-book’.[9]

Cartoon by Theo Zaschke, 1906

Imagine there’s no judgment …

If Klemperer’s straightforward alignment of Mahler with Nietzsche has been shown by contemporary scholarship to be something of an over-simplification, it is incontestable that Mahler was deeply impacted by the author of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. An acquaintance with Nietzsche’s and other literary critiques of metaphysics dating back to Jean Paul, whose Titan Mahler referenced in his First Symphony, made acquiescence to conventional religious belief as problematic for him as it had been for Brahms, who famously claimed in his late exchange on religion with Dvorak that he had ‘read too much Schopenhauer’ to espouse traditional Christian faith. At the same time it needs to be emphasized that Mahler did not simply jettison a Judeo-Christian symbolic framework in the overtly confrontational manner of other musical Nietzscheans such as Richard Strauss or Frederick Delius. Right up until his late works, Mahler instead explicitly attempted to integrate elements of Christian symbolism (shorn of their doctrinal basis) into his work on a philosophical rather a than theological basis, as if to preserve religion’s inner core through art; his friend Siegfried Lipiner’s statement that ‘He who means well toward religion should protect and support the efforts of those critics who want to kill its dogmas’[10] could well have been his own.

The two most obvious large-scale examples of this effort to re-define religious concepts by severing them from their dogmatic connotations are of course Mahler’s adaptation of Klopstock’s Resurrection in the finale to the Second Symphony (to which Mahler added his own works in place of the poet’s) and his daring – or shocking, depending on one’s point of view – combination of the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus with the conclusion to Part II of Goethe’s Faust in the Eighth. In both cases, the result is uniquely personal and cannot be described in terms of Mahler’s adherence to any pre-established religious or philosophical framework.

A startling example of the composer’s revisionism is provided by his program for a Dresden performance of the Second Symphony on December 20, 1901. Here Mahler begins his discussion of the 5th movement in the relatively conventional terms of Biblical apocalyptic:

‘The end of all living things is at hand, the last judgment is announced, and the whole horror of that day of days has set in.- The earth trembles, graves burst open, the dead arise and step forth in endless files.[…] the cry for mercy and grace falls terrifyingly on our ear.- The crying becomes ever more dreadful – our senses forsake us and all consciousness fades at the approach of eternal judgment.’

At this point, however, a surprising reversal occurs; Mahler has in mind something radically different in his finale from the vision of the Last Things offered by Christian theological orthodoxy:

‘Softly there rings out a chorus of the holy and the heavenly: “Risen again, yea thou shalt be risen again!” There appears the glory of God! A wonderful gentle light permeates us to our very heart – all is quiet and blissful! – And behold: there is no judgment – There is no sinner, no righteous man – no great and no small – There is no punishment and no reward! An almighty feeling of love illumines us with blessed knowing and being!’[11]

Mahler’s 1896 version of this program had been arguably still more radical, with the Nietzschean influence unmistakable:

‘What happens now is far from expected: no divine judgment, no blessed and no damned, no Good and no Evil, and no judge.’[12]

For Mahler, the belief in universal resurrection expressed in the Second Symphony must therefore be seen as an essentially philosophical rather than a religious notion. His poem expresses not the desire for eternal life as bestowed by the personal deity of Judeo-Christian tradition, but rather the intuition of the ontological necessity of dying and rebirth, in terms which have overtones of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence: ‘What has come into being must perish, what perished must rise again’.

The Second Symphony can thus be read in terms of Mahler’s life-long conversation between philosophy and religious tradition, as can the Eighth (Mahler’s letters to Alma on the subject speak explicitly of his ambition to reconcile Jesus and Socrates within a common framework of ‘creation through Eros’), in which Mahler follows the trajectory already mapped out by Goethe in terms of the philosophical appropriation of religious symbols, for example in the linking of the Mater Gloriosa and the Eternal Feminine.[13]

As Niekerk points out, the Abschied of Das Lied von der Erde , with its unforgettable final repetition of the word ewig, is an especially enigmatic instance of this dual philosophical and religious track in Mahler. The composer’s specificity, argues Niekerk, lies precisely in his willingness to embrace the full ambiguity of the word , with overtones both of religious transcendence and its reduction to pure immanence in the form of Nietzsche’s cyclic notion of eternal return. It is Mahler’s apparent refusal to choose unequivocally between the two which gives the music its persistent fascination and ongoing appeal in a present-day intellectual climate suspicious of unambiguous readings:

‘The term lives off the tension between the desire to find something eternal beyond the here and now and the realization that it is precisely life on earth that will carry on perpetually. […] In spite of its religious etymology, it does not in any way contain a promise that anything like a divine order or ongoing spiritual essence of nature exists.’[14]

Whereas Hart, Borthwick and Monti appeal to Bernstein in their reading of the ending of the Ninth, Niekerk turns to another great Mahlerian, Bernard Haitink, on the Abschied: “I don’t know if the end of Das Lied von der Erde is a consolation. I don’t know. It is just more than that. Humanity dissolves into the air and nothing is left. A sort of emptiness – which is very moving.”[15] Whether one accepts Niekerk’s line that ‘Mahler is searching for a philosophy of life and death that is decidedly postmetaphysical’, his point seems historically well-grounded when he asserts that we are dealing with something which is ‘more complex than any scenario that seeks to read some form of redemption into the end of Das Lied von der Erde.’[16] And it it this irreducibility to a conclusive reading which makes Mahler both an intriguing and problematic figure for theology in a way that mirrors the complexity of the Western intellectual tradition’s relationship to classical theism in the modern era. However, he is a composer whom theology can ill-afford to ignore; it is surely significant that the Mahler revival of the 1960s coincided with the rise of an ever-growing ‘spiritual but not religious’ constituency in the Western world, with whom the composer’s non-dogmatic spirituality would appear to resonate deeply. Here Niekerk’s remark at the outset of his analysis, that ‘music seems particularly well suited to accommodate a residual longing for meaning beyond the purely subjective that still exists in postmetaphysical times such as the early twenty-first century’,[17] seems highly pertinent. To engage with the many questions thrown up by Mahler’s oeuvre is to engage with just such ‘residual longings’ .

Devout musician?

As I conclude this post, another Facebook entry has just appeared which confirms the intuition that the position I describe is especially common within the artistic community – a ‘quote of the day’ from Sting offered by the Rock & Theology website:

‘In an interview for Time magazine, Sting said his religion was “devout musician.” When asked what he meant by that he responded:

It’s not a frivolous answer. I’m essentially agnostic. I don’t have a problem with God. I have a problem with religion. I’ve chosen to live my life without the certain ties of religious faith. I think they’re dangerous. Music is something that gives my life value and spiritual solace.’

This sounds strangely similar to an anecdote told by one of Mahler’s closest collaborators, the Vienna Opera set designer Alfred Roller, which is perhaps as good an encapsulation of Mahler’s fundamental ambivalence towards religious faith as any other:

‘Ernst Bloch describes Mahler among other things as “a human hymnal” and that is probably the most apt summing-up of Mahler’s essential nature. He was deeply religious. His faith was that of a child. God is love and love is God. This idea came up a thousand times in his conversation. I once asked him why he did not write a mass, and he seemed taken aback. “Do you think I could take that upon myself? Well, why not? But no, there’s the credo in it.” And he began to recite the credo in Latin. “No, I couldn’t do it.” But after a rehearsal of the Eighth [symphony] in Munich he called cheerfully across to me, referring to this conversation: “There you are, that’s my mass.”‘[18]

_______________

[1] Alastair Borthwick, Trevor Hart, and Anthony Monti, ‘Musical Time and Eschatology’ in Jeremy S. Begbie and Steven R. Guthrie (eds), Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 271-294: 275.

[2] Ibid., 280-281.

[3] Ibid., 283.

[4] Ibid..

[5] Carl Niekerk, Reading Mahler : German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Rochester, NY : Camden House, 2010), 217.

[6] Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: a Musical Physiognomy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 138. Emphasis mine.

[7] Ibid., 139. Emphasis mine.

[8] It has long been the established scholarly consensus that Mahler’s formal conversion from Judaism to Catholicism in 1897 was essentially a tactical manoeuvre designed to ensure his acceptability as a candidate for the post of music director of the Vienna Court Opera.

[9] Klemperer on Music: Shavings from a Musician’s Workbench, ed. Martin Anderson (Lancaster: Toccata Press, 1986), 147.

[10] Quoted Niekerk, Reading Mahler, 92. Niekerk’s discussion of the philosophical influence of Lipiner upon Mahler in chapter 3 is especially lucid.

[11] Reprinted in A. Peter Brown, The Second Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), 579. Stephen Hefling has conjectured that Mahler’s universalism derived from Lipiner’s teacher Gustav Fechner, whose opinion was that ‘there is no heaven and no hell in the usual sense of the Christian, the Jew, the heathen, into which the soul may enter … after it has passed through the great transition, death, it unfolds itself according to the unalterable law of nature upon earth … quietly approaching and entering into a higher existence.’ (Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode (1836), quoted in Stephen E. Hefling, Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 10.

[12] Quoted in Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) , 634n..

[13] Mahler’s simultaneous turn to the themes of the Spirit and das ewig Weibliche raises the tantalizing and as far as I can see unexplored possibility of a conversation between the composer and Teilhard de Chardin, whose poem L’éternel féminin, later analysed by Henri de Lubac, appeared in 1918, as well as with the Russian Orthodox exploration of the figure of Sophia in the work of Vladimir Soloviev and Sergei Bulgakov; like Mahler all can in some way be seen as trying to re-conceptualize notions of divine transcendence and immanence.

[14] Niekerk, Reading Mahler, 208.

[15] Frank Scheffer, Conducting Mahler, DVD (Paris; Idéale Audience, 2005). Quoted in Niekerk, Reading Mahler, 269n.

[16] Ibid..

[17] Ibid..

[18] Quoted in Norman Lebrecht, Mahler Remembered (Norton: London 1987), 163-4.

Top ten books 2011

Another ‘Top Ten’, this time of the most thought-provoking pieces of writing I’ve come across in 2011, listed in alphabetical order. Inclusion here doesn’t necessarily indicate my agreement with the authors concerned – who I’m sure would generate a lot of friction among themselves if you let them slug things out in an enclosed space! They have however all given me a good deal to chew on over the last year.

• Jeremy Begbie Resounding Truth
  
• Jason Clark, Kevin Corcoran, Scot McKnight, Peter Rollins  Church in the Present Tense
  
• Harvey Cox The Future of Faith
• Ian Morgan Cron Chasing Francis
• Elizabeth A. Johnson Quest for the Living God
• René Girard and Gianni Vattimo Christianisme et Modernité
• Stanley Hauerwas Hannah’s Child
• Jean Staune Notre existence a-t-elle un sens
• Peter Rollins Insurrection
• Holmes Rolston III Three Big Bangs: Energy-Matter, Life, Mind
  

Top ten of 2011

Da stand das Meer‘s Top Ten of new sacred music heard (though not necessarily composed) in 2011, listed alphabetically:

• Eriks Esenvalds (1977-) Passion and Resurrection (Hyperion recording with Stephen Layton, Carolyn Sampson, Polyphony, Britten Sinfonia)
• Vladimir Godar (1956-) Mater (ECM recording with Iva Bittova, Milos Valent, Marek Stryncl, Solamente Naturali, Bratislava Conservatory Choir, Dusan Bill)
• Galina Grigorjeva (1962-) Molitva for saxophone and organ (live recording with Virgo Veldi, Ulla Krigul)
• Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-) In tempus praesens (Deutsche Grammophon recording with Anne-Sophie Mutter, Valery Gergiev, London Symphony Orchestra)
• Betty Olivero (1954-) Neharo’t, Neharo’t (ECM recording with Alexander Liebreich Kim Kashkashian, An Raskin, Philipp Jungk, Lea Avraham, Ilana Elia, Münchener Kammerorchester)
• Roxanna Panufnik (1968-) Tallinn Mass ‘Dance of Life’ (Estonian Radio broadcast with Mihhail Gerts, Patricia Rozario, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and chorus)
• Arvo Pärt (1935-) Adam’s Lament (live performance with Olari Elts, Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Ensemble Orchestral de Paris
• Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-) Mass (live performance with Michael Gläser/Netherlands Radio Choir)
• Terje Rypdal (1947-) Lux Aeterna (ECM recording with Kjell Seim, Palle Mikkelborg, Iver Kleive, Åshild Stubø Gundersen, Bergen Chamber Ensemble)
• Valentin Silvestrov (1937-) Sacred choral works (ECM recording/DVD-ROM with book To Wait for Music (Duh i Litera)) with Mykola Hobdych, Kiev Chamber Choir)