THEOLOGY AND MUSIC

by Francis Watson

urtopic is theology and music — the conjunction

O expressing the modest hope that some useful demarca­

tions and interactions maybe identifiable here. We are
in no position to attempt, even in oudine, a theology of music.
Theologies of lay claim to a non-theological field in its entirety;
they attempt to annex it, to re-establish it on what are taken to
be its authentic theological foundations. They tend to find
their most congenial subject-matter outside the normal sphere
of the theological disciplines.1 But no theological annexation
of music is conceivable or desirable. The question is rather
whether any theologically worthwhile relationship between
the two disciplines can be established at all. To pose this
problem in its strongest form, I shall have little to say here
about the use of music within the Christian community and its
worship, confining myself to the more-or-less ‘secularized’
music of the European classical tradition of the past three
hundred years or so. And I shall omit all consideration of the
broader topic of ‘theology and the arts’. It does not seem
particularly helpful to assume that such diverse practices as
music, sculpture and drama are best considered in parallel to
one another.2
It cannot be said that a positive relationship between
theology and music must be possible if the God of whom

'See for exampleJohn Dillenberger, A Theology ofArtistic Sensibilities: The VisualArts

and the Church, London: SCM Press, 1987.
*For a recent study in this area, seeJeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation's Praise: Towards
a Theology ofthe Arts, Edinburgh: T. &T. Clark, 1991, which — unlike Dillenberger’s
book — has the merit of locating the arts within an emphatically trinitarian frame­
work. Begbie is particularly concerned to refute the Kantian denial of the cognitive
value of the art-work, claiming that art is ‘a valid, though distinctive, means of
cognitive access to the world’ (p. 229). The Kantian view is said to result in an
‘alienation of art’ from its true being. I am not convinced that theology has any
particular stake in an anti-Kantian aesthetic of this kind. From the perspective of
music, the question of ’cognitive access to the world’ seems entirely irrelevant to the
performance of, say, a Beethoven piano sonata. From the standpoint of theology, the
question is why, in the light of Christian faith's own ‘cognitive access to the world’, this
supplementary or alternative route is needed.

435
436 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

Christian faith and theology speaks is indeed the Creator of

heaven and earth, the Lord of the whole of reality. It is one
thing for God to be Lord of the whole of reality, quite another
for theology to have something pertinent to say about a
particular aspect of that reality. Theology attests the divine
lordship, but it does not share in its exercise. On the contrary,
it knows this lordship to be hidden. There is therefore no prior
guarantee that theology will have anything pertinent to say
about music. One would not expect an inquiry into the
relationship between theology and, say, chess to be particularly
illuminating. Will music necessarily prove any more illuminat­
ing as a dialogue-partner?
It does not seem desirable to attempt to fit music into a
pre-existing theological framework, on the assumption that
these two disciplines or practices must ultimately be commen­
surable. We cannot assume, with Karl Barth, that ‘Mozart has
a place in theology, especially in the doctrine of creation and
also in eschatology’,3 that ‘the playing of musical instruments
is a more or less conscious, skilful and intelligent human
attempt to articulate before God [the] sound of a cosmos
which is otherwise dumb’, that ‘the perfect musician is the one
who... is best able to hear not merely the voice of his own heart
but what all creation is trying to say, and can then in great
humility and with great objectivity cause it to be heard by God
and other men’.4 If there were any real theological or musical
warrant for these views, it might make our task a great deal
simpler. But the distance between the tradition-bound human
practice of music and the inarticulate voice of the cosmos is too
great to be bridged with such ease.5 The playing of musical
instruments has as its goal not the articulation of the voice of
creation but the performance—to the highest level attainable
— of particular works of music, on the assumption that these
works are worth playing and hearing; an assumption that
appears to need no further justification. The relationship

’Church Dogmatics III/3, ET Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960, p. 298.

’Church Dogmatics III/3, p. 472.
!For a sharp and effective critique of the myth of the solitary, non-tradition bound
artist, to which Barth tacitly appeals, see Nicholas Woltersdorff, 'The Work of Making
a Work of Music’, in P. Alperson (ed.), What is Music? An Introduction to thePhibsophy
ofMusic, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987, pp. 101-29.
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 437

between these works and the cosmos’s aspiration to praise its

creator is utterly obscure, and to assert this relationship as the
basis for a theological reflection on music serves only to
eliminate from the start the particular realities of the practice
of music. A theology rightly concerned to preserve the particu­
larities of its own practice must respect the integrity of this
other, quite different practice. But this will mean that the
apparently modest task of identifying demarcations and inter­
actions between theology and music becomes exceptionally
difficult and demanding; for the two practices cannot easily be
discussed within the same frame of reference.
In the light of the initial scepticism that this topic should
evoke, the best place to start is perhaps to consider the
assertion that music’s essential existence is to be located outside
the sphere of Christian faith and theology, in the realm of
unfaith. For example, in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or music is
correlated with ‘the aesthetic life’ and with the anti-Christian
or post-Christian relativism that this entails. In the first part of
this paper, I shall argue in opposition to Kierkegaard or his
pseudonym that there is no justification for this view. In the
second part, I shall attempt to correlate music with recogniz­
ably theological concerns by way of an analysis of music's power
to console. Until the concluding sections of the paper, the
concern to respect the integrity of musical practice will neces­
sitate a certain distance from explicitly theological discourse.

1. Music and ‘the Aesthetic Life’

In the first part of his Either/ Or (1843), Kierkegaard presents
a portrait of‘the aesthetic life’, subjecting it to criticism in the
presentation of an ethically-oriented life in part two. The two
presentations are, supposedly, the work of individuals re­
ferred to simply as ‘A’ and ‘B’. Their manuscripts are said to
have come to light by chance in a secret drawer of an old desk;
they have been arranged and edited by their discoverer, one
Victor Eremita, and it is his name rather than Kierkegaard’s
that stands on the original title page. There is thus a threefold
distancing of Kierkegaard himself from the aesthetic life as
presented by A: it is the work of another, it is subjected to
criticism by B within the pages of the same book, and it is
introduced byway of the device of a Active editor. The editor
438 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

does, however, raise the possibility that A and B are the same
person at different stages of his development, and that the
book therefore has a single author.6
The characteristics of the aesthetic life are succinctly
summarized in the reflections entitled ‘Diapsalmata ad se
ipsum’ with which A’s contribution to the work opens.7 It is a
life characterized, first, by a lovingly-cherished melancholy:

In addition to the rest of the numerous circle of my acquaint­

ances, I still have one intimate confidante — my melancholy.
In the midst of myjoy, in the midst of my work, she beckons to
me and calls me aside... My melancholy is the most faithful
mistress I have known; whatwonder, then that I love in return.8

A typical expression of this melancholy is the complaint that

no-one ever comes back from the dead, no-one enters the
world without weeping; no-one is asked when he wishes to
enter life, no-one is asked when he wishes to leave.9

The aesthetic life is characterized, second, by scepticism:

I have the courage, I believe, to doubt everything; I have the

courage, I believe, to fight with everything; but I have not the
courage to know anything; nor the courage to possess, to own
anything.10 *

My soul’s poisonous doubt is all-consuming. My soul is like the

Dead Sea, over which no bird can fly; when it has flown midway,
then it sinks down to death and destruction."

One ought to be a mystery, not only to others but also to one’s

self. I study myself; when I am weary of this, then to pass the time
I light a cigar and think: the Lord only knows what he meant by
me, or what he would make out of me.12
6S. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. D. F. Svenson and L. M. Svenson (vol.l),
W. Lowrie (vol.2), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959,1.13.
7Either/Or, 1.16-42.
‘Ibid., 1.20.
9Ibid., 1.25.
10Ibid., 1.23.
"Ibid., 1.36.
"Ibid., 1.26.
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 439

A’s scepticism is frequently enlivened by vivid descriptions and

by caustic, ironical wit. And there is at least one commitment
that is maintained without scepticism — a commitment to the
beauty of music, and in particular the beauty of Mozart’s
music. A speaks of his joy at hearing snatches of Don Giovanni
played by a street-musician below his room:

Music finds its way where the rays of the sun cannot penetrate.
My room is dark and dismal, a high wall almost excludes the
light of day. The sounds must come from a neighbouring yard;
it is probably some wandering musician. What is the instru­
ment? A flute?.. What do I hear — the minuet from Don
Giovannil Carry me then away once more, O tones so rich and
powerful... 0,acceptmy thanks, whoever youare! My soul is so
rich, so sound, so joy-intoxicated!13

Music is not presented here as a counter-weight to the melan­

choly and scepticism that pervades the ‘Diapsalmata’. On the
contrary, A’s love for music is of a piece with the aesthetically-
oriented life that he represents. His melancholy and scepti­
cism are not a problem for which music is the cure: for A is in
love not only with Mozart’s music but also with his own
melancholy and scepticism. Music affirms nothing. It does not
solicit belief, and it therefore leaves no room for doubt. It
offers a way of escape from the vicious circle of the opinions
and counter-opinions of philosophers and theologians. It
simply plays, and it is for that reason that the sceptical A can
affirm it.
The reference to Don Giovanni prepares the way for the
extended reflections on Mozart’s opera that follow the intro­
ductory ‘Diapsalmata’, under the title ‘The Immediate Stages
of the Erotic, or Musical Eroticism’. At the outset, A toys with
the idea of forming ‘a sect which not only gives Mozart first
place, but which absolutely refuses to recognize any artist
other than Mozart’.14 Indeed, the confines of the sect are still
more narrowly drawn:

"Ibid., 1.41; cf. 1.29-30.

"Ibid., 1.46.
440 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

In Mozart’s case it also happens that there is one work, and only
one, which makes him a classical composer, and absolutely
immortal. That work is Don Giovanni. The other things which
Mozart has produced may give us pleasure and delight, awaken
the admiradon, enrich the soul, satisfy the ear, delight the
heart; but it does him and his immortal fame no service to lump
them all together, and make them all equally great... Through
Don Giovannihe is introduced into that eternity which does not
lie outside of dme but in the midst of it, which is not veiled from
the eyes of men, where the immortals are introduced, not once
for all, but constandy, again and again, as the generadons pass
and turn their gaze upon them.. ,15

The reason why Don Giovanni is given this exalted status lies in
the perfect coincidence between its subject-matter — seduc­
tion or, more generally, sensuousness or eros — and its
musical form: for eros is expressible only in music, and eros is
the essence of music.16 It cannot be portrayed within the clear
outlines of sculpture or painting, for in its drive towards the
desired object it is inherently temporal, incapable of presen­
tation within any static medium. Poetry is also an unsuitable
medium for eros, since it cannot render the non-verbal imme­
diacy of desire. Only in music can eros be adequately repre­
sented. Mozart was fortunate enough to find the one abso­
lutely musical subject for his opera.
According to A, appealing to the principles of Hegelian
dialectic, it was Christianity that brought eros or sensuousness
into the world in the very act of excluding it:

Since the sensuous generally is that which should be negated,

it is clearly evident that it is posited first through the act which
excludes it, in that it posits the opposite positive principle. As
principle, as power, as a self-contained system, sensuousness is
first posited in Christianity; and in that sense it is true that
Christianity brought sensuousness into the world... Christian-

"Ibid., 1.49.
16Kierkegaard uses the terms del Sandselige and Sandselighed, which the English
translators render sometimes as ‘the sensuous’ and ‘sensuousness’ and sometimes as
‘the sensual’ and ‘sensuality’ (see their note, 1.447). The title of these reflections on
Don Giovanni — ‘The Immediate Stages of the Erotic, or Musical Eroticism’ —
suggests that ‘eros’ is a suitable equivalent for the somewhat dated English terms,
‘sensuousness’ and ‘sensuality’.
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 441

ity is spirit, and spirit is the positive principle which Christianity

has brought into the world. But when sensuousness is under­
stood in its relationship to spirit [i.e. as its contrary], it is clearly
known as a thing that must be excluded; but precisely because
it should be excluded, it is determined as a principle, as a
power; for that which spirit — itself a principle — would
exclude must be something which is also a principle, although
it first reveals itself as a principle in the moment of its exclu­
sion.17

Paradoxically, Christianity’s renunciation of the flesh for the

sake of the spirit has the effect of bestowing on the excluded
flesh a reality as the principle of an anti-Christian life that it
previously lacked. The figure of Don Giovanni is, as it were, the
flesh incarnate. But so too, in another sense, is music itself,
which is ‘the art which Christianity posits in excluding it from
itself, as being a medium for that which Christianity excludes
from itself, and thereby posits’.18 Music may of course express
many things and not just this one thing; and yet eros or the
flesh is its absolute, proper object. In the expression of eros,
music coincides with its own essence; it is withdrawn from all
alien, non-essential functions, in order to be itself:

The genius of sensuousness is... the absolute subject of music.

In its very essence sensuousness is absolutely lyrical, and in
music it breaks forth in all its lyrical impatience. It is... force,
life, movement, constant unrest, perpetual succession; but this
unrest, this succession, does not enrich it, it remains always the
same...19

Don Giovanni’s constant, restless movement from one seduc­

tion to the next is the perfect image or metaphor for the
essence of music. For this reason, ‘music has always been an
object of suspicion from the standpoint of religious enthusi­
asm’. In general, ‘the stronger the religiosity, the more one
renounces music and stresses the importance of words’.20
Music, then, is the art of the sensuous, the art of seduction, the

"Ibid., 1.59-60.
"Ibid., 1.63.
"Ibid., 1.70.
KIbid., 1.71.
442 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

art posited by Christianity in the gesture of exclusion whereby

the flesh acquires the firm outlines of a clear anti-Christian
principle.
The association between music and sensuousness is con­
firmed, A believes, by a comparison between music and
language.The idea that music begins where language ceases,
that music is therefore a higher medium than language, is
dismissed as a sentimental illusion. Music ‘always expresses the
immediate in its immediacy’; on the other hand, language
‘involves reflection, and cannot, therefore, express the imme­
diate’.21 In language, the sensuous dimension is virtually ne­
gated: in hearing someone speak, one does not hear the
movement of his tongue, one attends to what he says. As a
medium in which the sensuous is negated, language cannot
adequately express music’s direct communication of the sen­
suous. Yet this inability is a strength rather than a weakness.
Music, as the expression of the immediate, is an inferior
medium to language, which presupposes the mediation of
reflection. One corollary of this is that, in writing about music,
one should avoid at all costs the ‘multitude of insignificant but
very noisy predicates’22, the stock of adjectives on which music
critics draw in an attempt to convey the character of a piece of
music: ‘tranquil’, ‘passionate’, ‘turbulent’, ‘despairing’, ‘ec­
static’, ‘incandescent’, and the like. Language is incapable of
speaking adequately of music, and makes itself ridiculous
when it tries to do so.
It follows that Don Giovanni lacks the power of elo­
quence, which would make him unmusical; he is quite differ­
ent in this respect from the pathologically self-conscious
seducer whose ‘Diary’ concludes the first part of Either/Or:23
Don Giovanni

is absolutely musical. He desires sensuously, he seduces everyone.

Speech, dialogue, are not for him, for then he would be a reflective
individual. Thus he does not have stable existence at all, but he
hurries in a perpetual vanishing, precisely like music.. .24

"Ibid., 1.68.
"Ibid., 1.84.
“‘Diary of the Seducer’, ibid., 1.297-440.
"Ibid., 1.101.
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 443

This force in Don Giovanni, this omnipotence, this animation,

only music can express, and I know no other predicate to
describe it than this: it is exuberant joy in life.25

This exuberant joy is expressed especially in the overture:

When Mozart has thus brought Don Giovanni into existence,

then his life is developed for us in the dancing tones of the
violin in which he lightly, casually hastens forward over the
abyss. When one skims a stone over the surface of the water, it
skips lightly for a time, but as soon as itceases to skip, itinstantly
sinks down into the depths; so Don Giovanni dances over the
abyss, jubilant in his brief respite.26

Music, then, has its own unique contribution to make to ‘the

aesthetic life’. As we have seen, this life is characterized by a
melancholy and a scepticism for which the ultimate reality is
the formless abyss. Music does not banish melancholy and
scepticism; but it does lend variety and richness to the aes­
thetic life in demonstrating that there is an alternative to a
perpetual brooding on the face of the abyss: to dance over it.
Kierkegaard’s A is far too self-consciously reflective to aban­
don his brooding, but he has learnt from Mozart’s music
something of the exuberant joy of one who prefers to dance
over the abyss, without worrying about the final, inevitable
plunge into the depths.
Music is therefore annexed by a sceptical, agnostic world­
view. It is understood as an essentially anti-Christian art which
gives voice to that which Christian faith excludes: the flesh,
eros, or sensuousness as the principle of exuberantjoy in life.
On this view, the task of theology in relation to music would be
to warn against it. As Calvin puts it, it is only within the confines
of true Christian worship that music can be ‘free from vicious
attractions, and from that foolish delight by which it seduces
men from better employments and occupies them in vanity’.27
Its association with the ungodly dates back to its origin; for,

™lbid., 1.100.
*Ibid„ 1.129.
17 Genesis (1554), ET1847, repr. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965,1.218.
444 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

according to Gen.4.21, it was a descendant of Cain who

invented the first musical instruments. In its natural, unregen­
erate state, music epitomizes the vicious pursuit of pleasure
and the vanity to which the unrighteous have so inexplicably
devoted themselves. Calvin and Kierkegaard’s A are therefore
agreed about the place of music within the unregenerate
sphere of the flesh. Nor does A’s critic, B (or ‘Judge William’),
the supposed author of part two of Either/Or, do much to
oppose A’s interpretation of music as the quintessential anti-
Christian art-form. In defending the notion of an equilibrium
between the aesthetic and the ethical, B can offer only the
generalization that, when one chooses the ethically-oriented
life, the aesthetic is ‘excluded as the absolute’ but returns ‘in
its relativity’.28 While this is no doubt true, it is a quite inad­
equate response to A’s reflections on the essence of music as
disclosed in Don Giovanni. Thejudge appears to be unfamiliar
with Mozart’s opera, and may possibly be completely unmusical.
It is in keeping with the work’s emphasis on the reality of lines
of demarcation between the spheres simply to leave music
within the sphere of the aesthetic life, without any attempt to
reclaim it for any ‘higher’ ethical or religious purpose.
In response to all this, it does not seem helpful to object
that A has mistaken the nature of Christianity by interpreting
it in the light of the antithesis of spirit and flesh. It is true that
in certain contexts this antithesis might express a fundamen­
tally un-Christian dualism; but that is not the case here. Don
Giovanni, the incarnation of the excluded principle of the
flesh, does not simply rejoice exuberantly in the goodness of
life in general; on the contrary, as his servant Leporello
informs us near the start of the opera, his exuberance takes the
specific form of serial seduction—no less than a thousand and
three in Spain alone, quite apart from other parts of Europe.
If the flesh is identified with serial seduction, then it is obvious
that Don Giovanni’s life-orientation is radically anti-Christian.
There is also some truth in A’s claim that this life-orientation,
in its specifically anti-Christian form, is posited by Christian

nEither/Or., 2.182. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (and writing under

another pseudonym), Kierkegaard points out that, in Either/Or, A is ‘far superior to
B as a dialectician’ (ET Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, p.227).
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 445

faith itself, in the very act of excluding it. What is much more
questionable is the claim that there is an inner complicity
between the Don’s life-orientation and the nature of music,
such that each may stand as a metaphor for the other. Does
Don Giovanni’s erotic drive really disclose something essential
about music itself? Oris the conjunction in this opera between
music and eros a matter of contingency?
In interpreting Don Giovanni as a disclosure of the erotic
genius of music itself, Kierkegaard’s A has seriously misunder­
stood the opera. His own account of the genesis of his interpre­
tation makes it clear exactly how this misunderstanding could
arise. We cannot, he thinks, employ ears and eyes simultane­
ously, and it is proper that we should close our eyes when
listening to music in order that nothing visual should distract
us from the sound. The theatre, however, makes provision for
the eye as well as the ear. In quest of the perfect musical
experience, A writes:

I have sat close up, I have sat farther and farther back, I have
tried a comer in the theatre where I could completely lose
myself in the music. The better I understood it, or believed that
I understood it, the farther I was away from it, but from love, for
it is better understood at a distance... There have been times
when I would have given anything for a ticket. Now I need no
longer spend a single penny for one. I stand outside in the
corridor: I lean up against the partition which divides me from
the auditorium, and then the impression is most powerful; it is
a world by itself, separated from me; I can see nothing, but I am
near enough to hear, and yet so infinitely far away.29

The equation between music and eros therefore comes into

being outside the auditorium, in abstraction from the totality of
the performance itself. From this odd vantage-point, the opera
will be subjected to a number of reductions, as its devotee
rejects what he takes to be its accidental features in his quest
for its essence, which is also to be the essence of music itself.
The loss of the visual dimension means, in the first place, that
the link between the music and the unfolding dramatic action
is given up. If the music is simply an expression of eros

nEither/Or, 1.119.
446 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

personified in the figure of Don Giovanni, then nothing

essential will happen; music will be understood as pure succes­
sion, without variation or telos. Outside the auditorium, the
words will be lost and the characters will become indistinct; the
singers’ attempts to breathe life into the characters by gesture
and expression will be unavailing. The possibility that the
music itself needs character and plot is excluded from the
outset. For A, the ideal conditions under which to appreciate
Don Giovanni would be to listen to it on disk, without a
translation of the libretto, equipped only with the knowledge
that the protagonist is a celebrated seducer. In that way, with
everything accidental removed, the essence of music as the
immediate expression of eros might be perceptible.
Once the supposedly accidental is restored to Don
Giovanni, it becomes a quite different opera to the one expe­
rienced by A. As the opera begins, the thousand and three
Spanish seductions lie in the past. The Don, masked so as to be
unidentiable, unsuccessfully attempts not a seduction but a
rape, and in the confusion that follows he kills his victim’s
father, the Commendatore. Hurrying back to the scene with
her betrothed, Don Ottavio, Donna Anna discovers her fa­
ther’s body and in her griefjoins with her beloved in swearing
to avenge her father’s death. From the outset, then, the theme
of the opera is not the fantasy of exuberant serial seduction in
itself but the overtaking of this fantasy by reality: not, in the first
instance, the reality of supernatural nemesis with which the
opera concludes, but the reality of the victims of the fantasy.
With the possible exception of Leporello, all of the characters
in the opera are, in one way or another, the Don’s victims; and
it is their solidarity — which includes even the dead
Commendatore — that finally secures Don Giovanni’s down­
fall. The opera effectively demythologizes the perennial male
fantasy of endless seduction. It acknowledges the seducer’s
power, especially in its portrayal of the Don’s relationship with
the peasant-girl Zerlina — although here too seduction or
rape is finally unsuccessful. But it also acknowledges that, in
the end, reality is more powerful than fantasy. To speak of Don
Giovanni dancing lightly over the abyss before finally sinking
into the depths is simply to collude with his own fantasy; but
that is precisely what the opera itself does not do.
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 447

Mozart’s music is integrally bound up with this dramatic

action. On the one hand, the dramaneeds musical expression.
An operatic libretto would almost always make a very poor
play, for it is necessarily dependent on the music to supply the
expressive nuance that the words in isolation lack. On the
other hand, the music cannot be detached from the drama, as
though the drama were a mere accidental vehicle for a purely
musical experience. The unfolding dramatic action provides
the music with a series of focal-points which ensure that its
expressive power does not remain unfocussed but helps to
render the various facets of character which the dramatic
action brings to light: not only the Don’s insatiable erotic drive
but also the grief and anger of Donna Anna and Donna Elvira,
the touching loyalty of die gende Don Ottavio, the sardonic
humour of Leporello, the supernatural solemnity of the
Commendatore as the embodiment of nemesis. But the music
remains permanendy in need of the text if it is to be heard as
rendering precisely these context-bound character-facets.
Without reference to text or context and on the basis of the
music alone, one could at best arrive only at broad generaliza­
tions about these character-facets. The music assists the repre­
sentation of character as it unfolds within the dramatic action,
but it cannot serve as an adequate substituteior text and drama;
it lacks the precision characteristic of word and gesture. It
cannot express anything direcdy and immediately - even eros;
and, if it is to express eros (as it may do), it needs the
complement ofword and gesture. Music approaches closest to
direct expression where composers deploy conventions about
the kind of music that is appropriate for rendering a particular
emotional state; but the need for conventions already indi­
cates that any identification of music with immediateexpression
is untenable. While music assists word and gesture by way of its
expressive nuance, thus making possible a level of emotional
participation that would otherwise be impossible, the effect of
music is also to generalize or universalize text, character and
action, by representing them within a medium that lacks the
precision of word and gesture and tends towards a relatively
unfocused expansiveness. Music, it seems, lacks the bounda­
ries characteristic of the speech-act, in which one thing is said
to the exclusion of any other, and it retains something of this
448 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

expansiveness even when linked with the particularities of

text, character and action in the form of opera.
The significance of all this for our theme — the relation­
ship between theology and music — is largely indirect and
negative. Following the musical example selected by
Kierkegaard, I have argued that music cannot and should not
be understood as the immediate expression of eros or sensu­
ousness, understood as a total life-orientation or principle
posited by Christian faith in the act of excluding it. The
general possibility of life-orientations posited by Christian
faith in the act of exclusion appears to be a reality, and the
career of Don Giovanni (in both senses of the word) exempli­
fies one such life-orientation. What is completely unfounded,
however, is the attempt to identify an essential relation be­
tween the seducer, dancing lightly over the abyss, and the
nature of music itself. The integral relationship between
music, text, character and action does not permit any such
reductive interpretation. There is therefore no basis for the
assumption that music’s natural habitat is ‘the aesthetic life’,
characterized by the gratifying melancholy and scepticism for
which ultimate reality can only be pictured as an abyss in which
every particularity is finally swallowed up. There is no neces­
sary correlation between music and agnosticism, and it is not
the case that religious believers (Christian, Jewish or what­
ever) are somehow excluded from direct access to it.

2. Music and Consolation

In order to explore the possibility of a more positive relation­
ship between theology and music, I wish now to reflect on
music’s power to console— in order to prepare the way for the
theological question, to which we shall turn at the end of these
reflections: the question by what right and with what claim to truth
music offers us consolation. I do not assume that all music (or
all ‘good’ music) is consolatory; I shall in fact use music’s
capacity to celebrate as a foil for its consolatory power, and there
are no doubt many other modes in which music may be said to
affirm (or negate) the reality to which it is always indirectly
related. Nor do I assume that ‘consolatory’ music is necessarily
better than other types of music; I select this category of music
for reflection because of its possible theological significance,
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 449

not on the basis of a purely musical value-judgment. At the

same time, certain valuejudgments will no doubt be implied
in the discussion that follows. It is impossible and undesirable
to evade value-judgments in this sphere, since this sphere is in
fact constituted by a series of slowly-shifting, collective value-
judgments as to the small proportion of the total field of extant
music that is still worth performing and listening to.
When David returned from the defeat of Goliath, he and
King Saul were greeted by women from ‘all the cities of Israel,
singing and dancing..., with timbrels, with songs ofjoy, and with
instruments of music’ (1 Sam.18.6). Here, as often in the more
‘sacred’ and less ‘secular’ sphere of the Psalter, music is celebra­
tory in character. But in 1 Sam. 16.14-23, music has a different
role and it is, no doubt, a different music that is played. King Saul
is persistendy tormented by an evil spirit from die Lord, and this
leads his servants to propose seeking out ‘a man who is skilful in
playing the lyre—and when the evil spirit from God is upon you,
he will play it and you will be well’ (1 Sam.16.16). David is
selected, and for a time this cure for royal depression is highly
successful: ‘Whenever the evil spirit from God was upon Saul,
David took the lyre and played it with his hand; and Saul was
refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him’
(1 Sam.16.23). Music here restores the king’s sense of the
world’s goodness. David played, vfraxvah tsa’ul uftdb Id - ‘and
there was space for Saul and it was good to him’. Confined
within the narrow space of mental torment, Saul is brought into
a broader space that restores to him his freedom of movement
and that is therefore ‘good’. The consolatory music that has set
Saul again within broadened horizons is, we may guess, a music
that acknowledges and encompasses the negativities of exist­
ence but nevertheless transforms them through the power of
musical form and artistry, so that negativity gives way to conso­
lation. A purely celebratory music would jar with the king’s
initial mood; it would not console, it would mock. A consolatory
music would heal by acknowledging, encompassing and trans­
forming negativity.Where, on the other hand, consolation is
inaccessible, music itself must cease:

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we

remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres.
450 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors

mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How shall we
sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? (Ps. 137.1-4)

The mocking request for a celebratory music is refused by way

of a symbolic renunciation of the instruments of music. Even
a consolatory music seems impossible in Babylon — except
that this impossibility is expressed in the form of a song, a song
about the impossibility of song.30
As an initial example of music’s power to console, we may
take the accompanied recitative that follows the Overture in
Handel’s Messiah (1742). Consolation is the theme of the
biblical text with which the dramatic action of this work
opens:31 ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem and cry unto her that her
warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned’ (Is.40.1—
2a, AV). The librettist (Charlesjennens) omits the concluding
words of Is.40.2 (‘for she hath received of the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins’), and hastens on to the announcement
of ‘the voice of him that cryeth in the wilderness, Prepare ye
the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for
our God’ (Is.40.3), which in turn leads into the aria ‘Every
valley shall be exalted’ and the chorus ‘And the glory of the
Lord shall be revealed’, where the text set is that of Is.40.4-5.
Within its total biblical context, Is.40.3 refers to John the
Baptist’s work of ‘preparing the way of the Lord’ (Mk.l .3 and

”1116 psalms all appear to have been written for musical performance. Fifty-seven
of them are described as a mizmor, a ‘melody’, twenty-nine as a Sir, a ‘song’ (these
figures include thirteen psalms in which both terms are used). A number of psalms-
tides also refer to the musical instruments to be used (Pss.4, 5,6, 54, 55, 61, 67, 76)
and may include references to a particular tune (Pss.6,8,9,12,22, 45 [=69, 80], 46,
53,56,57 [=58,59,75], 60,62 [=77], 81=84,88). According to A. Weiser (The Psalms,
Old Testament Library, ET London: SCM Press, 1962, pp. 22-23), the tunes are
referred to by the opening words of the presumably secular songs from which they are
drawn. References to musical instruments are common within the main body of the
psalms (e.g. Pss.33.2, 57.8, 92.3,149.3,150.3-5). In the light of Ps. 137.2, one might
conjecture that this psalm was intended to be sung unaccompanied. The importance
of music within the temple worship is emphasized especially by the Chronicler (cf. 1
Chr.6.31-48,15.16-28,25.1-8; 2 Chr.5.1 lb-13 [an insertion between the two halves
of 1 Kgs.8.10], 29.25-30, 34.12, 35.15).
51The assumption that, unlike his other oratorios, Handel’s Messiah lacks any
dramadc acdon can only stem from inattention to the particular (mainly Old
Testament) texts selected and to their total biblical context.
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 451

parallels; in Lk.3.4-6, the whole of Is.40.3-5 is quoted). The

‘comfort’ or consolation that is offered to ‘my people’ thus
refers to the imminent revelation of ‘the glory of the Lord’ in
the incarnation: ‘The Word became flesh, and dwelt among
us, full of grace and truth; and we have beheld his glory, glory
as of the only Son from the Father’ (Jn.1.14). The composer
and his librettist rightly understand that the message of
Immanuel, God with us, is first and last a message of comfort
and consolation. The music is by no means a superfluous
addition to words that might equally well convey consolation
simply by being read. On the contrary, the music enacts the
consolation of which the text speaks. After the rather austere
E minor of the Overture, the effect of the shift to E major for
the accompanied recitative is that of a sudden radiance — far
more so than if the key selected had been, say, G major or A
major, in which case the close connection with the Overture
would have been lost. The new key and the gentle sequential
melody already begin to enact the consolation of which the
tenor will sing in his first entry: ‘Comfort ye... ’ The comfort of
which he sings is therefore the comfort which is the content of
Christian faith; but it is also simultaneously a purely musical
comfort. Music here is not placed at the disposal of some
purpose that is alien to its own nature: it exercises its power to
console by purely musical means, although in conjunction
with the text. That is not to say that music possesses any
inherent power to communicate the distinctive comfort that is
the content of Christian faith. Music alone will not tell us that
the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and
truth. Yet this musical example suggests that there may, on
occasion, be a congruence or analogy between music’s general
power to console and the particular and ultimate consolation
inherent within Christian faith.
It is, however, difficult to isolate music’s ‘power to con­
sole’ from its other moods and capacities. Not all music is
consoling; that is, not all music acknowledges and encom­
passes the negativities of existence and yet transforms them,
restoring a sense of the world’s goodness. No doubt almost any
music might be subjectively experienced as consoling, but the
point here is to try to identify a ‘power to console’ as an
objective musical possibility, despite the obvious vagueness of
452 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

this category. Following the preceding reference to a key-shift

from minor to major, one might understand that as a formal
sign of music that is distinctively consolatory in character. Yet
this is not necessarily the case. Works such as Beethoven’s Fifth
and Ninth Symphonies are built on the polarity between the
minor key of their opening movement (and the scherzo) and
the major key of the finale. But it is not clear that the effect is
one of ‘consolation’. The finales of these works are, surely,
more celebratory than consolatory in character: they do not
acknowledge, encompass and transform the negativities of
existence, for these negativities are here simply absent, ban­
ished to the past. There is, no doubt, in the rhetorical ‘weight’
or emphasis assigned to these finales within the context of the
work as a whole a sense of an indeterminate conflict success­
fully negotiated (in contrast to the lighter-weight finales of
Haydn and Mozart, which are completely lacking in such
mythical significations.) But the celebration of a victory has
little to do with consolation. However, that does not mean that
Beethoven’s music in general lacks a power to console. If the
construction of the Fifth Symphony on the polarity between C
minor and C major does notmake this a ‘consolatory’ work, the
construction of the two-movement Piano Sonata Op.lll on
precisely the same polarity results in a profoundly consolatory
effect. The reason for the difference is, in part, that the C
major theme and variations with which the Sonata concludes
lacks the rather triumphalistic brashness of the finale of the
Symphony. It does not simply deny the almost unrelieved
sombreness of the opening movement in C minor, with its
relendess semiquaver movement, but ‘answers’ it in a manner
comparable to the Handel example discussed above; the
unusual two-movement form of the Sonata therefore estab­
lishes its coherence as a genuinely ‘consolatory’ work. The
modulation of the C major theme into A minor (reproduced
in the following variations) also ensures that, in this music,
negativities are acknowledged and transformed; an unrelieved
C major would have been much less effective in this respect. As
in the Handel example, it is notable here that a ‘consolatory’
effect is achieved by stricdy musical and formal means that can
be more-or-less clearly identified. What is at issue is not what
this or that listener subjectively experiences but what shouldbe
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 453

experienced by an ‘ideal listener’ on the basis of objective

features of the music itself.
It would be a mistake to base the concept of musical
‘consolation’ too exclusively on the polarity of minor and
major. In contrast to the celebratory Fifth Piano Concerto,
Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto in G is surely a supremely
consolatory work. That it is so is not simply the effect of the
contrast between the E minor slow movement and the G major
outer movements. In both the Fourth and the Fifth Concertos,
the piano is heard at the outset, before the conventional
orchestral tutti. If one compares the opening of the Fourth
Concerto with the dazzling virtuoso display that opens the
Fifth, one is struck by the utter non-assertiveness of this simple
series of diatonic chords; the orchestra tentatively responds to
this in the remote key of B major, before reverting to the
security of the tonic. This non-assertiveness is so striking
because the Concerto is an inherently assertive musical form;
and it continues in a different form in the rest of the first
movement, in which the piano’s decorative and dance-like
passage-work often serves to accompany the orchestra, rather
than the reverse. Assertive and celebratory music simply ex­
cludes negativity; it does not pretend to console. But consola­
tory music may well be non-assertive in manner: for non­
assertiveness and gendeness are integral to consolation, the
object of which is after all the human being who suffers from
the negativities of existence and who cannot be consoled
without gentleness. In this Concerto, the gentleness proper to
consolation serves as the enduring foundation for the dance­
like gaiety of so much of the music.32

“Something similar might be said of the consolatory power of Mozart’s best music.
Karl Barth rightly speaks of this as ‘music which for the true Christian is not mere
entertainment, enjoyment or edification but food and drink; music full of comfort
and counsel for his needs' (ChurchDogmaticslll/3, pp. 297-98). Barth attributes this
consolatory power to Mozart’s ability to hear ‘the harmony of creation to which the
shadow also belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat,
sadness cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite
melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim ultimate sway’. Mozart ‘heard the
negative only in and with the positive. Yet in their inequality he heard them both
together, as, for example, in his G minor Symphony of 1788' (p. 298). It is unfortunate
that Barth’s reverence for Mozart led him to disparage other composers. Dismissive
remarks about the music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms are cited in E. Busch’s
biography (Karl Barth: his Lifefrom Letters and Autobiographical Texts, ET London: SCM
454 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

The concept of musical consolation seems to be both

precise enough for use as an analytical tool (although a degree
of vagueness is inescapable) and broad enough to encompass
a wide range of musical material. It does not imply a prejudice
in favour of any particular composer or tradition; and it does
not imply a prejudice against the music of the twentieth
century, although some may claim that they cannot find in
‘modern music’ the consolations they derive from the music of
previous centuries. The breakdown of a set of harmonic
conventions that persisted, although with considerable modi­
fications, from the early seventeenth to the early twentieth
centuries still seems to many to represent the violent incursion
into music of a destructive nihilism or iconoclasm that has
succeeded only in rendering much ‘modern music’ impossi­
ble to listen to. How, this anti-modernism will ask, can this
music possibly console? As an initial response, this music
reminds us that consolation is not the prerogative only of
music that can be heard with ease and that appears to make few
demands on the listener. The listening required by all good or
great music is not a merely passive receptivity; if the music is to
be heard as it should be heard, then listening itself will be a
demanding activity. The fact that a great deal of twentieth
century music makes explicit demands on its hearers is there­
fore not an argument against it. This music is, as it were, a
protest against the laziness of listeners for whom listening to
music must be no more demanding than sun-bathing. To ears
that are accustomed to the conventions of classical tonality, it
proposes new and different sound-worlds, usually overlapping
to some extent with the conventional ones and yet capable of
discovering genuinely musical sound in regions where, on the
basis of classical tonality, one would expect to find mere noise.
The astringency of much of this music (one thinks for example
of the six Bartok String Quartets) fulfils at least one of the
conditions for musical consolation as we have defined it: for
such music is far better able to acknowledge and encompass
the negativities of existence than the music contemporary with

Press,1976, pp. 362-63, 401); for anyone with a serious knowledge of the music of
these and other composers, a musical taste that confines itself to Mozart can hardly
be taken seriously.
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 455

it that continued to reiterate the gestures of the late romantic

period, as though nothing had changed. If, in the midst of the
disasters of the first half of the twentieth century, musical
consolation is to be found, it must take new forms if it is
genuinely to acknowledge and transform the new negativities
and inhumanities which the twentieth century so ferociously
unleashed. In this context, the consoladon offered by a be­
lated nineteenth century composer such as Rachmaninov will
come to seem a fake, however beautiful his sound-world may
sometimes be. Genuine consolation cannot be acquired as
cheaply and easily as such music sometimes implies. It is more
likely to be found in the utterly strange sound-world of works
such as Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, with its intense atonal
lyricism, or Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste.
The theological question, which has so far only been
mentioned in passing, iswhether and to what extent music has
the right to offer the consolation that, in many and various
ways, it does offer. As we have seen, genuinely consolatory
music attempts the apparently impossible task not only of
acknowledging the negativities of existence but also of trans­
forming and transfiguring them. On what basis does music
undertake this task? Do the negativities of existence actually
permit any genuine, enduring consolation, or is the supposed
consolation illusory, at best a moment of psychological res­
pite?
To pose this question in the strongest possible form, I
shall take as a final musical example the War Requiem of
Benjamin Britten (1962). In this work, the text of the Requiem
Mass is skilfully juxtaposed with the poetry of Wilfred Owen
that arose out of the carnage of the First World War. The
Requiem Mass is assigned to the full orchestra, chorus and
soprano soloist, the Owen texts to the tenor and bass soloists
and a chamber orchestra. It is immediately apparent that,
although this is ultimately a deeply consolatory work, no easy
and cheap consolation is to be offered. In contrast to the lyrical
tenderness with which Verdi and Faure set the opening words
of the Requiem Mass, ‘Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine’,
Britten’s setting is characterized by the frozen immobility of
the worshippers, who can enunciate the supposedly consola­
tory words only in the constant reiteration ofjust two notes, C
456 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

and F sharp, separated by the interval of the sinister and hollow

augmented fourth, and sung against the background of an
obscurely shifting orchestral accompaniment. In this setting,
the words have become hollow and meaningless; the text is
subverted by the music, lest it should offer a cheap consolation
that has not properly acknowledged the negativities that
underlie the music. The reason for this treatment becomes
clearer in the sudden intervention, at a gready increased
tempo, of the first Owen setting:

What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling from sad shires.

The reality of death on the Somme or at Passchendaele is

precisely that the normal reverent decencies that surround
death — symbolized by the Requiem Mass — are absent. War
savagely parodies those reverent decencies: the only choirs
whose music marks the occurrence of a human death are ‘ the
shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells’. The absence of the
decencies is not lamented, for in this context ‘prayers and
bells’ would be ‘mockeries’. What is lamented is the inde­
cency of the mass slaughter of ‘those who die as cattle’. But
the result is that the celebration of the Requiem Mass has
become an impossibility, an empty form or shadow. The
consoling thought of eternal rest — requiem aetemam—must
be banished to the margins of this opening movement,
where, at the very end, the hollow and obsessively-reiterated
augmented fourth resolves onto a scarcely-audible chord of
F major. In Britten’s rendering, the text of the Requiem Mass
is not permitted to use the gravity and power of its language
to impose a false peace on a situation in which there is no
peace. In order that the negativities of modern warfare be
fully acknowledged, the possibility of consolation must be
reduced to vanishing-point, so that it becomes no more than
a faint glimmer on die horizon.
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 457

Throughout the work, the relationship between the Requ­

iem Mass and Owen’s poetry continues to generate extraordinary
tensions. In the ‘Dies Irae’, the longest individual movement, the
terrors of the day ofjudgment are identified with the sleeping
soldiers’ terror of the coming day, when a major new offensive
is due to begin: that is the morrow in whose ‘shadow’ they
sleep. The words, ‘confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus
addictis’ are juxtaposed with a poem in which the agent of
retribution on the wicked is now a ‘long black arm, / Great gun
towering t’ward heaven, about to curse’. The gun is ironically
exhorted to ‘ Reach at that arrogance that needs thy harm ’, but
the point of the poem is to express the hope that God will
finally ‘curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!’ The curse that
the great gun pronounces as the agent of the earthly ‘dies irae’
is to fall back on its own head. The sorrowful prospect of the
day when guilty human beings arise from the earth to be
judged (‘Lacrimosa dies ilia, / Qua resurget ex favilla /
Judicandus homo reus’) evokes the poet’s reflections on a
sorrowful win ter day on which a fellow-human (asoldier) failed
to rise from the earth, beyond the reach of the sun which draws
all living things up into the light. If the sun’s gift of life leads
to an abomination such as this (the soldier’s miserable death),
why does it bother with its officious nurturing? In the
‘Offertorium’ the reference to the promise of salvation to
Abraham and his seed leads into Owen’s terrible parody of
the story of Abraham and Isaac, at the end of which, in
defiance of the angel’s command, the old man ‘slew his son,
— / And half the seed of Europe, one by one’. The jubilant
‘Sanctus’ is deflated by a poem in the manner of Tennyson’s
In Memoriam sequence, sceptically undermining Christian
belief in resurrection: ‘Of a truth / All death will He annul,
all tears assuage?’ — a question which ‘white Age’ and ‘the
Earth’ answer in the negative. Throughout the work up to
this point, the need to acknowledge and encompass the
negative realities of war, as mediated through Owen’s texts,
excludes the possibility of a transformation of those
negativities — the possibility, in other words, of consolation.
At those points where the text of the Requiem Mass seeks to
console, it is quickly recalled to the reality of negativities
which, it appears, admit no consolation.
458 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

Only in the final movement, the ‘Libera me’, does the

possibility of consolation return from the margins of the work
into the centre. Britten here sets to music Owen’s best-known
poem, ‘Strange Meeting’, in which the poet (represented by the
tenor soloist) dreams of an underworld encounter with a dead
soldier (the baritone soloist) who, as the poet passes, suddenly
leaps up ‘with piteous recognition in his eyes, / Lifting distress­
ful hands as if to bless’. The dead soldier, also a poet, laments the
disappearance along with his death of the poetic vision that was
coming to fruition in him; the truth that he has perceived about
‘the pity of war’ will now remain for ever untold. One truth,
however, must be told — the truth that underlies the sudden
recognition that occasioned the ‘strange meeting’:

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

The demonic parody of intimacy in the form of face-to-face

combat with bayonets is transformed, astonishingly, into the
basis for a true intimacy: the dead German soldier, knowing
himself as the enemy of the one whose frown passed through
him and whose bayonet he failed to ward off, nevertheless
addresses his killer as ‘my friend’. What is there left to be said?
Simply this: ‘Let us sleep now’ — words that Britten, unlike
Owen, assigns to both protagonists. At this point, for the only
time in the work, Owen’s words are sung simultaneously with
the words of the Requiem Mass. As the tenor and baritone
soloists sing, ‘Let us sleep now’, over and over again, the chorus
and the soprano soloist pray for the salvation of the departed:

In paradisum deducant te Angeli: in tuo adventu suscipiant te

Martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Cho­
rus Xngelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere
aetemam habeas requiem. Requiem aetemam donaeis, Domine;
et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiescant in pace. Amen.33

“‘May angels lead you into paradise; at your arrival may the martyrs receive you,
and lead you into the holy city ofjerusalem. May the choir of angels receive you, and
with Lazarus, once poor, may you have eternal rest. Grant them eternal rest, O Lord;
and let perpetual light shine upon them. May they rest in peace. Amen.’ '
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 459

At this point alone, the war-dead are enfolded in the consola­

tion of the ancient Latin text and of a music in which the
shattering negativities whose reality the work has so starkly
acknowledged are finally transformed. After the spare, angu­
lar, recitative-like setting of‘Strange Meeting’, the lyrical flow
of this deeply consolatory music appears to proceed from
some quite different source.
Yet it is not clear how this consolation is possible. The
work as a whole has treated with extreme caution the idea that
there might be any consolation for the fate of ‘those who die
as cattle’. The day ofwrath —which is also, in the end, the day
of salvation — has been demythologized. In line with the
interest in non-religious interpretation of religious language,
current at the time of composition, the onlyjudgment that the
sleepers await is here the major new offensive that is to begin
the following morning. War subverts faith in the goodness of
creation and hope of the resurrection; and without faith and
hope the love that turns even the enemy into a friend is merely
a profoundly moving gesture. By what right does this music, so
wary of exploiting its own capacity to console, conclude by
exploiting this capacity with such extraordinary effectiveness?
The same question is raised by all genuinely consolatory
music. Consolation is not consolation if it is offered cheaply
and easily. It must acknowledge the negativities to which it
seeks to respond. But, if there is to be consolation rather than
merely a sharing of grief, it must be able to transform those
negativities. Is music in itself capable of such a transformation?
Are the realities of the. battle of the Somme, still almost
unbearable to contemplate even eighty years later, really
susceptible to transformation by music alone? Does music
simply offer a subjective experience of consolation, and is this
experience to be interpreted as anything other than an inner-
musical event with no basis at all in the reality of the world
outside music?
These questions confront us with an either/or choice
related to, although not identical to, the one analyzed by
Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. A purely musical consolation,
with no significance beyond music, would belong within the
‘aesthetic life’: the music that may on other occasions enable
us to dance over the face of the abyss, like Don Giovanni, here
460 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

offers us temporary solace in the face of the abyss whose

negativities we cannot deny. The alternative is to conclude that
the indeterminate, partial consolation offered by music is at
least distandy related to a greater and final comfort stemming
from an ultimate reality understood not as abyss but as the God
acknowledged in Christian faith. ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my
people, saith your God’\ if there is, in music or in Christian
preaching, any warrant for the practice of consolation, it must
derive exclusively from this point, from the command or call
of God. Christian preaching attests this comfort direcdy and
explicidy; music does so at best indirecdy and implicidy, and
the consolation it offers is therefore in itself indeterminate
and questionable. So indirect is this relationship to the source
of consolation that many of those who find consolation in
music would reject with incredulity the notion of an ultimate
basis for consolation. In the social and cultural sphere in which
western ‘classical’ music is still cherished, Christian faith is
now almost everywhere overlooked, misunderstood or re­
jected, and the Kierkegaardian alternative of regarding music
as a more-than-acceptable substitute for faith will seem infi­
nitely more persuasive than any attempt to interpret it in the
light of faith.
Yet such an interpretation in the light of faith in ‘ the God
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and
the God of all comfort’ (2 Cor. 1.3) is at least coherent. If,
above and beyond the indeterminacy and questionableness of
musical consolation, there is a true and final and absolute
consolation in the God who has not remained aloof from us
but has come to us as Immanuel, full of grace and truth, and
who intends us to find consolation in this, then the fitful light
of musical consolation takes on a new significance. In the light
of the eternal light, it begins to shine more steadily. It be­
comes, whether implicitly or explicitly, a witness. Historically,
this music has developed in close proximity to Christian faith,
and it should come as no surprise that this relationship should
at certain points be an essential one and not merely accidental.
Theologically, too, there is no reason for surprise that, even in
the relative secularity which is also a marked characteristic of
the western tradition of ‘classical’ music, something might be
heard that is not unrelated to the supreme divine act in which
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 461

the negativities of existence are acknowledged, encompassed

and transformed, for the sake of our consolation. If this
acknowledging, encompassing and transformation is real, and
if the consolation it brings is therefore genuine, then one
would expect to encounter signs or parables of this not only in
the church, where this divine action is acknowledged, but also
in the world, where it is not acknowledged;34 for the ultimate
truth about the world is not that it is the sphere of unbelief and
godlessness but that it is the beloved object of the divine saving
action and therefore the place within which that divine saving
action continues to operate. To acknowledge Jesus as Lord is
to acknowledge him not only as Lord of the church but also as
Lord of the world. His lordship of the world is still more deeply
hidden than his lordship over the church; for within the
church there exist explicit points of resistance to the insidious
or blatant denials of his lordship which constantly occur in this
sphere too, whereas outside this sphere the denial of his
lordship appears to encounter no resistance and can be
silently taken for granted by all right-thinking people. Never­
theless, from the standpoint of Christian faith, the conceal­
ment of the lordship ofJesus over world as well as church can
hardly be absolute, even apart from the church’s own mani­
fold action within the world. At a greater or lesser distance
from Christian faith, earthly lights may be detected which
cannot claim to illumine the ultimate foundations of reality by
their own inherent capacities but which nevertheless derive
their fitful light, indirectly but really, from the one true and
eternal light that continues to shine in the darkness. The
disclosures of reality that these small lights make possible,
indeterminate though they may be in themselves, are there­
fore not unrelated to the final and ultimate disclosure of
reality that has occurred through the one true and eternal
light. On the contrary, they derive from this final and ultimate
disclosure. The light becomes sound when, in Christian proc­
lamation, it takes the form of speech, and — indirectly and on
occasion — it may become sound a second time, in the form

“This assertion of the possibility of ‘parables’ of the kingdom of God outside the
boundaries of the church is (heavily) indebted to Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3,
ET Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961, pp. 110-35.
462 SCOTTISH JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY

of music; not all music, and not any music always, but at least
some music sometimes, and therefore as a real possibility that
has been and is still actualized rather than as a mere hypothesis
or speculation.
There are, indeed, many perspectives from which all this
will seem entirely unsatisfactory, saying either too little about
the significance of music or too much, ascribing to it an unduly
restricted role or burdening it with capacities and concepts
that are in fact irrelevant to it. Perhaps (as Carlyle thought)
music is ‘a kind of unfathomable speech, which leads us to the
edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that’?35
If music has an inherent capacity to disclose the ultimate basis
of reality, then to describe it as, at best, only a parable will be
to belittle it.36 Perhaps, on the other hand, music merely ‘ exists
to provide something to listen to, and does so by specifying
ways of providing sounds for listening’?37 A cautious empiri­
cism of this kind will remain obdurately tone-deaf to the
possibility that the significance — or a significance — of music
lies as it were beyond itself.
Music is, at best, only a parable; but it is, or may become,
truly a parable. As a parable, it has an exterior form which
locates it unproblematically alongside other ‘secular’ prac­
tices and disciplines. This exterior form can never be dis­
counted; it never becomes transparent to an interior radiance,
for it is precisely the exterior form — the empirically-existing
practice of music — that constitutes the possibility of the
parable. But for those with ears to hear, music may on occasion

“Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, London: World Classics 1907, p. 112.
“Similarly unrestrained claims about the unlimited significance of music are
made by Hans Rung, in his Mozart: Traces of Transcendence (ET London: SCM Press,
1992). Mozart’s music ‘may preserve us from meaninglessness and despair’ (p. 29).
His music ‘embraces me, penetrates me, delights me from within, completely fulfils
me. The statement comes to mind: “In it [sic] we live and move and have our being”’
(p. 32). 'In this overwhelming, liberating experience of music, which brings such bliss,
I can myself trace, feel and experience the presence of a deepest depth or a highest
height... To describe such experience and revelation of transcendence religious
language still needs the word God...’ (p. 34). Why bother withJesus and the Christian
gospel when we can be instantly transported into the presence of transcendence by
the simple acdon of putting on a CD, in the comfort of our own home?
“Francis Sparshott, ‘Aesthetics of Music — Limits and Grounds’, in P. Alperson
(ed.), What is Music? (see note 5, above), pp. 33-98; p. 51.
 THEOLOGY AND MUSIC 463

speak of that which lies beyond it: not of an undifferentiated

and formless ‘transcendence’ but of the God who enacts and
speaks comfort and consolation on behalf of his people and
his world.

Francis Watson
Department of Theology and Religious Studies
King’s College London
Strand, London WC2R 2LS
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