God's Song and Music's Meanings

Theology, Liturgy, and Musicology in Dialogue

James Hawkey, Ben Quash, Vernon White, James Hawkey, Ben Quash, Vernon White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317126393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Taking seriously the practice and not just the theory of music, this ground-breaking collection of essays establishes a new standard for the interdisciplinary conversation between theology, musicology, and liturgical studies. The public making of music in our society happens more often in the context of chapels, churches, and cathedrals than anywhere else. The command to sing and make music to God makes music an essential part of the DNA of Christian worship.

The book's three main parts address questions about the history, the performative contexts, and the nature of music. Its opening four chapters traces how accounts of music and its relation to God, the cosmos, and the human person have changed dramatically through Western history, from the patristic period through medieval, Reformation and modern times. A second section examines the role of music in worship, and asks what—if anything—makes a piece of music suitable for religious use. The final part of the book shows how the serious discussion of music opens onto considerations of time, tradition, ontology, anthropology, providence, and the nature of God.

A pioneering set of explorations by a distinguished group of international scholars, this book will be of interest to anyone interested in Christianity's long relationship with music, including those working in the fields of theology, musicology, and liturgical studies.

Part 1
The meanings of music in Western history

1 Mellifluous music in early Western Christianity

Carol Harrison

A description of how the Jews of Minorca were coerced to convert to Christianity might not seem promising material for a paper on music in early Western Christianity, but the account of the 4th-century bishop of Minorca, Severus, of how the Jews on the island were led to embrace Christianity is in fact very revealing.¹ This was largely due to the manner in which they were coerced: what happened in Minorca following the arrival on the island of the relics of St Stephen, during an eight-day period in 418, sometime before the beginning of Lent, was not an inquisition with trials and tortures but what I would like to call a mellifluous assault on the senses: the Jews on Minorca were indeed physically assaulted to convert, but through what Severus believed to be the miraculous workings of divine grace upon their bodily senses: their sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. In the course of his work Severus carefully, almost systematically, takes each sense in turn, in order to demonstrate how individual Jews were converted to Christianity by their sensory experience of divine presence.

Hearing and seeing are treated first and occupy the first two-thirds of the treatise, but it is hearing that predominates (or maybe that is because I was listening out for it). Severus’ Jews overhear, mishear (to providential effect), turn a deaf ear, are alternately terrorised or seduced by hearing, and have their minds and hearts converted by outward sounds, by inward words, and by their response to what they have heard. Music has a key role here, and it is one which I hope will allow me to highlight some of the key features of what little we know of the nature and role of music in late antique Christianity for our further discussion.

At two significant points in the treatise the psalms are sung with what Severus describes as an ‘uncanny sweetness’ (mira suauitate psallentes) (11.4) or a ‘wondrous sweetness’ (mira iucunditate decantabat) (13.1–2).² The first instance occurs when Theodorus, the head of the Synagogue, dreams that he is warned not to enter the Synagogue by a man who tells him there is a Lion inside. When he peers into the building he is met, not by a Lion but simply by the sight, or more importantly, the sound, of monks (one presumes Christian monks) singing the psalms with ‘uncanny sweetness’. Theodorus’ reaction might at first seem odd: he is overcome by a ‘great … and deadly terror’ (11.5) and immediately flees in fear. What is happening here? Severus explains that Theodorus’ encounter with the mellifluous chants of the monks was for him – presumably as an unbeliever – a terrifying encounter with the Lion. It soon becomes clear that the aforesaid Lion is the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David’ (Rev. 5:5), in other words, Christ. So the sweet singing of the psalms conveys the presence of Christ, who, for an unbeliever, is an object of terror – a sort of Rilkean terror of the beautiful: ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us, because it serenely disdains to destroy us’.³

In the second instance, it is not the singing of the psalms by Christian monks which is described but rather the singing of the psalms by Jews. This episode is intriguing for a number of reasons: firstly, the psalm is described by Severus as a ‘hymn to Christ’ sung in ‘abundance of joy’ by Christians who are processing to the Jewish Synagogue for a debate (13.1–2); secondly, the ‘wondrous sweetness’ of the Jews’ singing, as they pick up the tune and join in, is a clear echo of the ‘uncanny sweetness’ of the Christian monks’; thirdly, it suggests that Jews in Minorca not only spoke Latin but that Jews and Christians used chants which were either identical or similar enough for one to join in with the other.⁴ What is happening here? Bradbury suggests that the Jews joined in, in order to turn the meaning of the psalm verse against the Christians: ‘Their memory has perished with a crash and the Lord endures forever’ (Psa. 9:7–8). That may well be the case, but the ‘wondrous sweetness’ of their singing is a clear indication that there is more than that going on here. As we have seen, and as subsequent miracles associated with tasting and smelling sweetness clearly confirm, ‘sweetness’ is Severus’ shorthand for the presence of God, of Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, which works to bring reluctant Jews to conversion – so perhaps the Jews’ mellifluous contribution to the psalm singing is also an indication of the incipient working of God to bring about their full participation as Christians. From very early on, the act of singing had been used by the early Christians as a metaphor for harmonious relations and as a means to achieve that unity, both within the individual soul as well as among individuals.⁵ At the very least then, what we have here is an audible demonstration of the common tradition, texts and typology which Jews and Christians shared and which were the grounds for Jewish conversion.

A later episode might add weight to this interpretation: when the Jews (mistakenly, it turns out) hear the rumour that their leader, Theodorus, has converted to Christianity (a misunderstanding Severus attributes to divine providence), they react, as Theodorus did in his dream, by fleeing: not just that, Severus tells us that they, like Theodorus before them, are fleeing from ‘the terrible lion … who from the site of the synagogue, as had been revealed to Theodorus, had unleashed through the monks the roar by which He put fear in our resisting enemies’ (16.10). So the monks’ singing – the sweetness of the presence of Christ, the Lion of Judah – is heard as a frightening roar by resistant Jews, who promptly flee, pursued by the lion. Equally significant, however, is the fact that, left alone in the very Synagogue where he had had his dream, after all his fellow Jews have fled, Theodorus himself peers around once again, but this time he misses his former anxiety and terror and hears, not the roaring of the Lion, but only its name and the monks still singing their psalms (16.11). Theodorus is on the cusp of conversion; his ears are becoming attuned to Christ as he appears in the psalms, and the Lion is no longer heard as a wild beast but as Christ, the Lion of Judah.

It quickly becomes apparent that the flight of the Jews from the roaring lion of monastic psalmody is one that precipitates them into conversion: as the Israelites were exiled from Egyptian unbelief, so Minorca’s Jews were exiled in the wilderness from their own former unbelief (Severus is very keen on the typology of the Exodus (e.g. 20.15–16)) and one by one they, like the Israelites, encounter miraculous visions (20.14), showers of hail (20.13), pillars of fire (20.15–16), bitter water turned to sweet honey (by the presence of the wood of the cross (24.5–9)) – until the air itself grows so fragrant with the smell of honey, and the dew on the grass, that they are able to taste it and discover that it is, indeed, sweeter than honey (20.14 Cf. 24.10).

Mellifluous miracles abound, then, but the women of Minorca were made of sterner stuff. It is amusing to note that whilst their male counterparts, one by one, submit to conversion, it is the women who hold out until the bitter end (24.1). The ‘deaf ears’ of the last to convert, the wife of Theodorus’ brother, Innocentius, were only converted through a veritable bombardment of prayers and hymns. As Severus puts it, drawing on Exodus imagery again, ‘Our army sweated until nearly the third hour in contests of hymns and prayers against Amalec, the enemy of our leader Jesus’ (Exodus 17:8–17; 27.5). Alternating prayer and psalmody is, of course, a common feature of monastic psalmody, practiced from very early on (if we follow Christopher Page) by urban house ascetics, followed by the desert fathers and Western communities such as the one in Marseilles, described by Cassian. Whether they used this practice to gradually coerce, wear down, and overcome the resistant soul is open to question, but it would not be incompatible with the monastic ideal. There are worse ways of being persuaded than being assaulted by prayers and hymns – and that, I think, is the point of Severus’ work. In this treatise music is described as one of the ways in which God acts in order to bend, break, and batter the resistant soul, and once subdued, to mend and remake it. It is experienced as wondrously and uncannily sweet, but, for the one who resists the presence of God, as also frightful and terrifying. The presence of the divine can equally occasion delight or terror – or indeed, delight and terror. Its sweetness is indeed wonderful, a matter of miracle, as it is due to the presence of God singing – or, in the case of unbelief – roaring, through it. Its very sweetness, its beauty, inspires in those who will not accept its source a terrified urge to flee. But for Severus, this very flight, like the flight of the Israelites from Egypt, is one towards, rather than away from, conversion.

What, then, can we discover about the nature and presence of music in early Western Christianity from this treatise? Its sweetness is the presence of God, the Trinity, and can work miracles in the one who hears it; it is part of God’s multi-sensory assault on the senses in order to convert people to Himself; it is at once mellifluous and terrifying. It appears in the singing of psalms or hymns, in Church and in the streets, by monks and by lay people, Christians and Jews; combined with prayer it can overcome the most resistant of wills; it is an expression of the harmony of the soul and can unify those who perform it.

Deus creator omnium: Ambrose, Augustine and sensuous music

Severus’ mellifluous music resonates closely with the sort of music we discover if we turn from Minorca to Italy and North Africa, to Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo – two of the most influential Christian bishops and theologians of the 4th/5th century in the West. One of the earliest Christian hymns, Ambrose’s Deus Creator Omnium, appears in an early work of Augustine’s entitled On Music,⁶ one of a projected series he set out to write, soon after his conversion, on the seven liberal arts, clearly intending to draw on his classical education and former career as a rhetor to exercise the intellectual muscles of devout Christians such as himself and to lead them through the intellectual disciplines, from what he describes as ‘the corporeal to the incorporeal’. However disconcerting it might at first appear as an account of music as we would now think of it, the De Musica is a work we cannot ignore: it is the only one devoted specifically to music by a Christian theologian in this period, and in its treatment of music as a classical discipline it lays the groundwork for what was to become a recognizable genre of Christian writing on music in later Western authors such as Boethius, Isidore of Seville, and Cassiodorus.⁷

Augustine’s treatment of ‘music’ in the first five books of this work is indeed precisely what his educated contemporaries, pagan as well as Christian, would expect: a meticulous, painstaking account of the conventions and technicalities of classical poetic metre or rhythm.⁸ It therefore reads more like a work of mathematics than music. His ancient readers would have been disconcerted, however, only at the point at which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Part 1 The meanings of music in Western history
• Part 2 The work of worship and the meanings of music
• Part 3 The meanings of music and the mystery of God
• Index