It is not at all that the word of man in the Bible has an abnormal significance and function. We see from the Bible what its normal significance and function is. It is from the word of man in the Bible that we must learn what has to be learned concerning the word of man in general. This is not generally recognised. It is more usual blindly to apply to the Bible false ideas taken from some other source concerning the significance and function of the human word. But this must not confuse us into thinking that the very opposite way is the right one. There is no such thing as a special biblical hermeneutics. But we have to learn that hermeneutics which is alone and generally valid by means of the Bible as the witness of revelation.
Most time-tested schools of thought ultimately converge, in some form, on one of two answers about the fundamental, generative reality of (depending on the field being analyzed) a person, society, culture, or the universe: either conflict or love. Every logically subsequent decision — which is to say, everything — hangs on this determination.
The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is an emphatic, unambiguous determination in favor of love as the foundational reality.
“[Perhaps] it’s true that the surest path to certain kinds of scientific knowledge is the construction of strictly third-person accounts of things; but we mustn’t forget that there really is no such thing as a third-person perspective. All perspective is, by definition, first-person. The third-person vantage is a methodological fiction without any objective existence. It’s a mere distillate of an accumulation of first-person reports; and then, of course, even those supposedly impersonal reports must still be translated through the privacy of our own minds. … The myth of pure ‘objective’ verification encourages us to imagine that the proper authority of the first-person vantage can be alienated from itself and situated instead in some fabulous, unbiased place of observation located nowhere, or everywhere, or wherever we want, but somehow outside of subjectivity. But a myth is all it is. That ‘third person’ is a mirage, like the spectral companion that wanderers in wild places sometimes hallucinate walking alongside them. In the end, there’s only the first-person vantage.”
— David Bentley Hart (as Psyche), All Things are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life, 30–31
In a fabulous essay on the ambiguities of Paul Kingsnorth’s lifelong project as summed up in his new book, Against the Machine, Adam Smith takes a stab at defining “the Machine”:
There are various ways to explain what the Machine is, but one way is to start with that fact. If writing books about it is a trap, it’s because the Machine is the sort of thing—though crucially it is not an actual thing—that assimilates resistance. The Machine is a judo artist who uses an opponent’s own energy against him. It thrives on attention, and negative is as good as positive, maybe even better. The Machine is Lululemon selling pricey work-out shirts emblazoned with anti-capitalist slogans to aspiring young socialists. The Machine is people standing patiently in line to see the fourth Matrix movie, vaccine passports in hand. The Machine is people buying Against the Machine on Amazon. The Machine is a website dedicated to local life.
It is perhaps impossibly self-indulgent to note that on a previous occasion, writing in reaction to an essay by N. S. Lyons, I made a similar (if much less elegantly articulated) observation about that other perennial bugaboo, “the Enlightenment”: “Every Counter-Enlightenment inevitably has a great deal of Enlightenment still in it.” In the jargon of critical theory, attempts to subvert the Machine typically end up reinscribing the Machine’s logic. “Modernity,” “capitalism,” “Enlightenment,” “Machine” — all have this quality of indefinitely, and at first invisibly, co-opting their opposition.
This, I have come to think, is the quality characteristic of the demon whom Jesus called Mammon. And if Mammon is not himself the “prince of the power of the air,” he is at least the ruling “spirit of this age.” He is, fundamentally, the demon of reductive exchange: I will take this complex personal reality in front of you, he whispers, and turn it into a complicated balance sheet. He turns the infinitely valuable into something valued, something you can manipulate and trade. He turns the I-Thou into a much more convenient and less demanding I-It.
There is almost nothing on which Mammon cannot work his gentle sterilizing magic. The only exception is found at Golgotha, in the convergence of Cross and empty tomb. Mammon cannot make sense of it. Mammon in his time has sent many to their deaths — even highly valued and useful deaths (indeed, for a righteous person one might even dare to die). But this apparently pointless death of God’s Son — for the wayward orphans? This taking of the world’s sins in exchange for divine righteousness? And the glorying of the redeemed in — the Cross? The joyful exchange does not compute in the world of reductive exchange. Even more is Mammon perplexed by what this “rising from the dead” means. Never has he heard of such a thing. After all, in his world there is no new possibility, nothing unprecedented, nothing without analogy. Life, indeed, is a mystery to Mammon, only made sensible by conversion into the terms of death. But this now-indestructible life beyond death? It is all foolishness, indeed, a scandal to right-thinking people.
The only escape from or resistance to the Machine — that is to say, Mammon — is to live each moment in the power of the Cross, as if the death and resurrection of Christ have truly reconstituted the world, according to the logic and power not of reductive exchange but of the joyful exchange. “These men,” exclaimed the indignant Thessalonian citizen-mob, “who have turned the world upside down have come here also!” That is the authentic exclamation of Mammon when faced with the true gospel. When you meet someone whose life is truly kept free of the love of money (not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect!), you will easily recognize the sublime simplicity of one who lives by the joyful exchange.
So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Let the Cross be our glory and the resurrection the source of our moral order. Everything else Mammon can co-opt, but not those. And once everything else is subjected to those, Mammon will have precious little room. He will wither away into the shadow of Unbeing which he truly is and has been the whole time. So this is the final point: do not be against Mammon simply for the sake of being against Mammon. You must indeed be against him — you cannot serve two masters — but be against him as the natural result of your being for God, the God who is for us.
A spectacular (and spectacularly long) passage from Barth on the church:
To understand this we must above all try to see that over against Jesus Christ the Church is not a chance, i.e., an arbitrary construction. It is not created, formed and introduced by individual men on their own initiative, authority and insight. It is not the outcome of a free undertaking to analyse and come to terms with the self-revealing God by gathering together a community which confesses Him, by setting up a doctrine which expounds and proclaims His truth in the way that seems most appropriate to these men. Applied to such a church, the extra ecclesiam nulla salus would in fact be an enormity. In face of such a church we should all have not only the right but the duty, a duty to faith, to appeal to the free grace of God to be made blessed outside of it. In face of such a church we should have to insist at least upon civil toleration, not only in the name of humanity but in the name of God. A church of that kind has nothing to do with the subjective reality of revelation. We can say quite simply that a church of that description is not the Church but the work of sin, of apostasy in the Church. Naturally none of the fathers whom we mentioned could possibly be thinking of that kind of church. We can and must say, of course, that where the Church is, there also we have always this church which is not the Church, i.e., that in the Church the work of sin and apostasy is always going on as well. There is no time at which to a greater or less degree the Church does not also have the appearance of such a church. There is no time at which to a greater or lesser degree it is not actually a church in this sense. There is no time at which it is quite inappropriate to remember that Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Church, and not the Church the Lord of Jesus Christ. There is no time at which the Church is not compelled by the arbitrary human action which constantly arises at its very heart to remind itself through Holy Scripture of its origin, and to let itself be ruled and therefore corrected from the standpoint of this origin against upstart arbitrarinesses. But the nature of the Church cannot be gathered from man’s upstart arbitrarinesses in it. Just as, similarly, Jesus Christ cannot be understood from the standpoint of man’s nature and kind, which He assumed and adopted, and which are only too familiar to us. What we men apprehend is ultimately and at bottom an accidental or arbitrary search after God, in which we can see only sin against God and a falling away from Him—never the unity between God and man, in which our nature and kind are in Jesus Christ genuinely and finally liberated from such strivings. That there took place in Him revelation and reconciliation between God and man we can comprehend only when we see and understand that the eternal divine Word was here made flesh. It is that which at this point brings light into our darkness. It is that which signifies liberation and purification. It is that which effects revelation and reconciliation. It is that which is the unique reality of the person of Jesus Christ. And the same is true of the Church of Christ. Because it is true of Jesus Christ, it is also true of His Church. The place or area in history at which—and at which alone—reception of revelation is achieved, the visible and invisible coherence of those whom God in Christ calls His own and who confess Him in Christ as their God, in other words the Church, has no reality independent of or apart from Jesus Christ. It is not that because of the sovereignty of their reason, will or feeling men have concluded for Christ or have become “Christians,” i.e., subjects of the predicate Christ. Where that occurs you have sin or falling away. And where any church is only the Christian Church in this sense, namely the church in which Christ is the predicate and not himself the subject, it has itself become the church of sin and apostasy, an heretical church. But the Church of Christ, which really is what it is called, does not exist in this independent reality. Although there is in it no lack of man’s upstart arbitrariness, it exists in dependence on Jesus Christ. And it is because it lives by Jesus Christ, not because it is constantly involved in upstart and arbitrary action, that it is the true Church.
— Karl Barth, CD §16.1 (“The Holy Spirit the Subjective Reality of Revelation”), vol. I.2, pp. 213–14
I was asked the other day to explain my habitual use of the honorific “St.” — e.g., St. Paul, St. Augustine (of Hippo) — as a Protestant. (Asked, to be clear, in a non-hostile way!) Here is my response, edited and expanded from its original format.
Normally, in practice, I use that honorific for those recognized as saints in the pre-Reformation Latin church. The main group are those who are saints of the ecumenical or undivided church — the apostles (St. Paul), the early martyrs (Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas), the fathers (St. Augustine of Hippo) and mothers (St. Macrina the Younger) of the church, and so forth. The Anglican Communion also recognizes as saints a number of medieval Latin figures (St. Thomas Aquinas), inherited at the time of the break with Rome. By contrast, I think I do not normally speak of anyone post-Reformation as St. so-and-so — though if discussing someone who, while not so recognized by the Anglican Communion, is reckoned a saint by Rome or the Eastern churches, and the case for whose saintliness seems eminently reasonable, I would probably use it out of respect (e.g., St. Thérèse of Lisieux).
Of course, all of us in the Christian churches are “saints” in the dialectical Pauline sense — “sanctified, called to be saints.” When I speak of “the saints” I normally have this group in mind. But along with this understanding the church has, always and purely retrospectively, recognized certain men and women in Christian history as having been friends and servants of Christ in a distinctively discernible way. In service of our own life of imitating and being conformed to Christ, they are worthy of learning from, studying, and even in a limited sense imitating (in the degree that they themselves were faithful imitators of Christ). This is a sub-species, essentially, of having strong Christian friends: since I really am something like the weighted average of the five people with whom I spend the most time, should I not spend substantial time with those whose lives most strongly testify to the power of Christ at work in them? Not, of course, that this means the marginalization or exclusion of spending time in prayer and Bible reading, i.e., spending time with Christ Himself — the point is that these influences do not compete or even operate on the same plane. The church’s recognition of these men and women, and special use of the term “saint” for them to denote that in their own individual ways they were (are!) what we all are called and being reshaped to be, seems perfectly appropriate. In this sense, the use of “St.” is a way of disciplining my speech to obey the fifth commandment: honoring my fathers and mothers in the faith.
Now, as far as I can tell, the characteristic spirit of the saint is summed up by St. John the Baptist: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” The saints are to be honored as paradigmatic imitators of Christ, not worshipped as Christ Himself. In church history there are many ways that it seems clear to me that the honor due the saints has been at minimum over-extrapolated and at maximum blasphemously elevated. I am hardly unaware of them, and am wary of these accretions and abuses in the degree that seems to me appropriate in each case. Take as an example the practice of asking the saints for their prayers. A simple form of this is, I take it, perfectly unobjectionable and even reasonable in itself: the saints, we confess, are not dead but alive in Christ (cf. Matt. 19), and certainly no Protestant would (or should) object to asking your friends to pray for you or join you in your prayers. But in certain quarters this is expanded into the notion that one should ask the saints for their intercession rather than Christ for His, because Christ is far off and unapproachable whereas the saints are gentle and friendly, and their closeness to the throne guarantees one’s prayers a better hearing. To this I must say Nein! There is one mediator between God and humanity: the man Christ Jesus. Through Christ (who dwells in our hearts by faith) we have access to the Father — not, through the saints who dwell in our hearts by faith we have access to Christ and thus to the Father. (And so on and so forth with the standard and correct Protestant rebuttal texts.) The sole mediacy of Christ is not to be compromised for the sake of showing his friends pious respect. I suspect the saints themselves, with their fully redeemed vision of Christ, would shudder at this notion!
Nevertheless, I also take abusus non tollit usum to be an essential principle of the spiritual life. Nothing, be it ever so holy by God’s grace, that makes contact with and exists within the fallenness of this world is proof against abuse: not the words of Scripture, not the sacraments, not the Church’s authority to bind and loose. (I take this to be one of the core insights and impulses of Protestantism — which is why I am content to remain one.) This does not degrade Scripture’s holiness, the sacraments’ efficacy, the keys’ power. God’s persistent business throughout the history of humanity appears to be working for good what we meant, ever so misguidedly, for evil.
This leads to a larger question of theological taxonomy: What is the nature and authority of the tradition (for a tradition it eminently is) that is the recognition of saints? I would place it in a tertiary and subsidiary category. It belongs to the tradition as a guide to the right understanding of church history, not even principally to the right understanding of Scripture. This requires some exposition of my take on the relevant categories.
The primary, and in that sense sole, authority is Holy Scripture, which stands alone. No two-source theories here. Let me be clear: Scripture is a traditioned thing. It does not, and makes no pretensions to, fall from the sky complete (presumably in the King’s English), nor does it purport to have been dictated to its human authors such that it is in principle untranslatable (unlike the Quran). God gives it through, alongside, and for the normal processes and procedures of human existence and experience. The difference is that it is recognized by the eyes and ears of faith — the community of faith — as being no mere human word but as really being the Word of God, the words for which God takes definitive responsibility. This is confirmed to us in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ Jesus — all of which take place, in the richest possible sense, “in accordance with the Scriptures.” For this reason the communities that received the Word, in generation after generation, thought it necessary to make it a textually fixed thing: not so that it could be a “dead letter” but so that it could be, for all subsequent generations, “living and active,” that every day, as long as it is called “today,” the Word could speak its own independent “today.”
The secondary category, then, contains those traditions that belong to the rule of faith: they are the boundary markers of the Church catholic as being (in Webster’s phrase) the domain of the Word. The rule of faith is not Scripture, but to read Scripture in contravention of the rule of faith is to cease to interpret the Scripture as part of the Church, and (as Scripture testifies) there is only one Church. The nature of its authority is that it is handed down along with Scripture to orient us rightly to Scripture, ruling out certain readings (and the practices that depend on them) and ruling in others. Its authority is dependent on Scripture’s precisely because it appeals constantly and ultimately to the revelation of God revealed in Scripture through the mind and work of the prophets and apostles. Within this framework, there is an obvious need for elements that are not themselves Scripture but are commentary upon it. So the traditional catechism contains the Apostles’ Creed alongside the Decalogue and the Lord’s Prayer because it is the ancient baptismal confession. Similarly the creeds and conciliar judgments of the undivided church lie in this category. Abandon them and, well, God might not abandon you — He is notoriously and scandalously gracious — but you abandon the Church. They are in this sense articles of faith.
The tertiary category is really a subsidiary category of tradition: traditions that are venerable but do not belong to the rule of faith. This includes many liturgical practices like the sign of the cross, kneeling for confession, appending the antiphon Gloria Patri to the Psalms and the refrain “The Word of the Lord / Thanks be to God!” to other readings of Scripture, and the honorific “St.”. Many of these are, or grow out of, genuinely ancient practices — Tertullian speaks of the signing with the cross in the early third century, and in their writings the Fathers are always saying things like “as the most blessed and holy Cyril writes…” which is a logical precursor to calling him “St. Cyril.” The point is that they are distinctive disciplines of speech, thought, and gesture. When I pray a Psalm or read a portion of Scripture, especially one whose words make me uncomfortable, it is good for me to end by reminding myself of the divine origin and purposes of the Biblical text. When I am speaking words that remind me (often against my instinctive will) of my sinfulness and implore God to have mercy on me, it is good to adopt a bodily posture that accords with this self-humiliation. I am very happy to adopt and submit myself to such practices, especially under the guidance of my church as it adopts them. But they are at most expressions of belonging to the catholic tradition, not themselves definitive markers of that tradition’s boundaries.
Finally, there is obviously much disagreement — even within the large and unruly Protestant camp — over the boundaries between these categories. I cannot hope to resolve it here, only to sketch my own present view of these matters. As the above discussion indicates, I have little interest in — or envy of — a magisterium that would permanently render all such judgments for me. (As the life of the current Christian body ostensibly ruled by a magisterium indicates, it actually does not in practice.) This is because the Bible, and the church’s proclamation that seeks to think the Bible’s thoughts after it, do not seem meant to give us an exhaustive manual for responding correctly to life’s problems and questions. The Bible would look very different if it were (more like, say, the Quran and the Hadith in Islam). Instead, Bible, proclamation, and tradition are together all meant to make us wise for, and regarding, the salvation that is in Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 3:15).
As an example of Wagner’s misunderstanding of his own expressivist genius, take his most self-conscious effort at a classicist work, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. Here is a — wonderful and energetic! — performance of the Prelude. Wagner pitches it in a faux-Baroque register and dials back the adventurous harmonies a few ticks, such that it sounds by far the most conventional of his operas (compare even the earlier Prelude to Lohengrin, which is hardly Tristan und Isolde in its adventurousness.) It is an intriguing experiment for the expressivist-in-chief. And it is hard to deny that this piece is a lot of fun!
But aesthetically speaking, the experiment is a failure. Even when writing in a self-consciously restrained idiom, Wagner is unable to actually exercise any classicist restraint. (One hears a voice from Delphi intoning sternly: “Nothing in excess!”) There is hardly a passage that does not have at least one too many things going on at once, and often two or three.
The problems are signaled from the very beginning. It begins in classical style, with a four-bar subphrase, and then a two-bar gesture that follows the first two bars rhythmically while moving toward a different part of the harmonic map. So far, so promising. (Though even in the first bar, Wagner hints that he wants to escape the mold harmonically with an undeniably tasty passing whole-tone triad over VI — A•C#•F.) But then the theme goes off in a new direction: a three-bar descending sequence that helps establish (in its second bar) a dominant pedal tone, followed by four bars of intense string noodling over the dominant pedal tone, resolving to a… restatement of the main theme that begins in the subdominant! Because of this irregular phrase structure of 4+2+3+4, with no harmonic movement of any kind in the last subphrase (indeed much of it is exact repetition), the restatement of the theme arrives — somehow — aurally both too late and too early. And after that restatement begins, Wagner gives us an exhaustingly thick texture, in which for eleven consecutive bars (note that we have another 13-bar chunk here) there is not a single eighth-value without movement somewhere in the orchestra. The lines seem to climb indefinitely to the secondary dominant, ratcheting the musical tension up and up (and up and up and up)… until we finally get the first major resolution. Then follows an actually quite lovely passage that introduces the lyrical second theme (whatever else one wants to say about him, Wagner is good for a lyrical second theme), twice in full, then twice fragmenting, and it is all feeling very proportionate and balanced… until the strings start buzzing around while the winds are still unspooling the theme, with an irregularly beaten scalar figure that causes one to completely lose track of the meter. The opening texture returns with the bold third theme, which is actually set in nice, symmetrical four-bar phrases most of the way to the next subject (only one random five-bar phrase thrown in there)… but it is thick and loud the whole way, without much real development, and with so much activity everywhere in the orchestra that it is hard to attend to any one line. Wagner gives us a great deal of sound and fury (cheerful fury, at least), but signifying really very little.
For another example of this aesthetic dynamic, listen to the short quasi-fugal passage starting at 6:07 (p. 22 in the unfortunately unmeasured score). There are three different fugal subjects or motives — the main subject, which is taken from the third theme, starts in the winds; the accompanying subject, which seems to be new in this section, begins in the celli; and the repeated trill motif, which appears to be drawn from the preceding lyrical passage. It is not illegitimate to have three elements in your contrapuntal texture. But Wagner cannot stop himself from using all three right from the beginning, rather than introducing them one at a time. From the start of the passage it is impossible to tell by ear which of the two subjects Wagner intends to be primary. I find it telling that, in the video linked above, the video editing cuts from string section to string section with each statement of the accompanying subject, even though at the beginning of the passage Alain Altinoglu actually cues the winds for their primary (and more melodic!) subject, and only gives the celli a secondary cue. Altinoglu makes the correct choice — but can you blame the video editor for not following him? The most egregious choice is that the trill motif, after being quietly introduced in the bassoons in the first measure, is given to the second violins in the second measure and marked sforzando. It is an orchestra-wide sforzando, to be sure, but Wagner has not given us a chance to hear the main subject(s) in this setting before making the second violins rudely interrupt the (quieter) winds and celli! It sounds like someone has come in too early — and not in the way of the famous horn entrance at the recapitulation in Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Either it is aesthetic incompetence, or it is a deliberate thumbing of the nose at the fugue (which might count as aesthetic incompetence).
For ten minutes, it is practically all like this: nearly constant (almost frenetic) activity in the subsidiary voices, lines that go on just a bit too long, elements that are repeated too many times, such that it is almost impossible to actually attend to any individual element as it belongs to the whole. Instead, the listener must instead accept the whole, lean back in his or her chair, and be sucked under by the aesthetic tsunami. None of this makes, as I said above, the piece any less fun (for the audience; it is rather a pain to perform, at least as a string player). And indeed it has a kind of showiness that is characteristic of the whole Wagnerian Schule, independent of style. But it is one thing to embrace (or at least tolerate) the showiness and the excess when the work in question is chiefly expressivist. It is another when the work aspires, or at least appears to aspire, to meet and embody certain classical standards of excellence. Nobody forced Wagner to write in this idiom; he composed it in 1862, when he was comfortably established and internationally famous. The showiness and the excess indicates that its composer does not understand the real value and spirit of classicism, and its link with expressivism.
The great works of European art music exist in an aesthetic field defined by the dipole of classicism and expressivism, the two generative sensibilities that drive (or drove) developments in musical style between about 1700 and 1950. By “dipole” I am not picturing a Venn diagram but something more like a magnet:
As in the magnetic field, classicism and expressivism are dialectical and interpenetrating, not antithetical and opposing. There is no “pure” specimen of either. No one work, or composer, ever exemplifies one sensibility to the total exclusion of the other. In one period a work may be predominantly classicist despite its composer utilizing musical language and form that were originally developed from expressivist impulses. (Note: I use these two terms here in largely ahistorical ways — small-c and small-e, not the capitalized historical movements Classicism and Expressivism — for lack of better terms occurring to me at the moment.)
The mark of classicism is the aspiration to balance and perfection in musical presentation. The classical sensibility yields the sort of work about which one thinks: “There was not a single note out of place” — even if, as the Emperor is supposed to have told Mozart, there may have been “too many notes.” Stereotypically, Western music loves four-bar phrases, clean chord progressions with well-prepared resolutions, standard accompaniment figures and phrases (the Alberti bass being the most famous), and the like: these are hallmarks of the classical. There is a self-conscious inhabiting of traditional forms, even as they may be innovated or subverted in various ways. To be sure, there may be musical surprises, but they do not feel experimental. To the listener there is little or no sense of struggle in the act of composition, no matter how dramatic the music itself may be. To the performer the chief difficulty is making the music seem effortless, regardless of the technical challenge it may pose. The overriding impression in the greatest of these works is of exquisite craftsmanship, occasionally of an almost unearthly or inhuman perfection.
The mark of expressivism is the aspiration to communicate the hitherto incommunicable, to somehow reach across the gulf between composer, performer(s), and audience. (Note the asymmetry between the two core aspirations.) The expressive sensibility yields the sort of work about which one thinks: “That was so powerful!” — even if, in places, it seemed overwrought or difficult to follow. (Bertrand Russell’s remark about Wagner’s opera is apposite: “marvelous moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour.”) Traditional forms and stereotyped devices are used, but not loved; they are the composer’s vehicle, not his or her habitation. Every aspect of the music is, if not actually experimental, a potential site for experimentation; there are not so much musical “surprises” as a more or less steady experience of “surprise.” The listener is expected to not just hear but feel the sense of personal exertion that has gone into the composition; even the less dramatic moments reveal the struggle for expression by temporarily concealing it. To the performer the chief difficulty is summoning the emotional vigor to make the music seem sufficiently effortful. The overriding impression in the greatest of these works is of overwhelming genius, that the composer has somehow expressed the previously inexpressible.
The greatest of classicists is, of course, Mozart. There is nobody to match him — except perhaps Schubert, who stands after him but in the same rank. The second rank of classicists includes Mendelssohn, Chopin, Fauré, Tchaikovsky (yes, a classicist by temperament, except perhaps revealing his expressivist side in the Sixth Symphony!), Rachmaninoff, and the late Stravinsky (there’s something about those Francophile Russians). I am unsure whether to say Haydn is a classicist or an expressivist at heart; probably a classicist, albeit one who was toying with expressivism before it had come to full flower. Richard Strauss had the fullness of classicism within him — especially present, perhaps, in his Eine Alpensinfonie, in his Violin Sonata, and in some passages of the early tone poems. Mahler, too, wrote some marvelous classical passages, though mostly integrated into overall expressivist works — especially the waltz movements in his earlier symphonies; in his later period, the Sixth and Eighth Symphonies are remarkably classicist works despite the force of their expression.
The greatest of expressivists, who ushered this sensibility into maturity after Haydn had disclosed a new measure of its potential, is Beethoven. In his earliest works, one can hear him toying brilliantly (if sometimes unimpressively) with the classicism of his teachers, at times sounding impatient to get on to writing in his own way. His Third Symphony is still the touchstone expressivist (and Romantic) work, often imitated but never bettered, with its astonishing self-confidence, its total mastery of and almost equally total disregard for musical convention. More subtle in this regard, but no less masterful, are his late string quartets, especially Opp. 130 and 131. (But in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies especially Beethoven showed that his embrace of expressivism did not indicate a total repudiation of classicism.) Wagner undoubtedly aspired to be, and maybe imagined himself to be, the greatest of expressivists, but he did not understand its hidden and tragic secret: that it depends irreducibly on the dialectical tension with the classicist pole for its power. Among Beethoven’s successors, the greatest expressivist accomplishments are those of Schumann (in the solo piano works), Mahler (in the Second and Ninth Symphonies), and Strauss (Ein Heldenleben), though they also at times exhibit the tragic tendency of expressivism to cut loose from classicism and thus lose itself. Also deserving mention are the French luminaries of expressivism, Debussy and Ravel. The early Schoenberg (cf. Verklärte Nacht and the first string quartet) had the promise of greatness, but his turn to anti-tonality was his undoing. Dmitri Shostakovich, long after much of European music had followed Schoenberg down his disastrous path, continued cultivating the genius of expressivism, as did his Soviet colleague Sergei Prokofiev.
In the middle zone of the dipole, offering remarkable and singular syntheses of these two sensibilities, stand J. S. Bach and Brahms. Perhaps less brilliant than those two, but great nevertheless, is Anton Bruckner, who offers his great expressiveness with remarkable musical economy and in a (yet more remarkable) spirit of humility. And the Vier letzte Lieder of Strauss dwell in the same extraordinary territory.
Next I need to read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy — whose title, I just learned, originally continued … Out of the Spirit of Music — to see how closely my intuition here maps to his famous juxtaposition of Apollo and Dionysos.
If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear.
— Deuteronomy 21:18–21
“To what then shall I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.’ For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”
— Luke 7:31–35
And… the very next passage in Deuteronomy is the law of the hanged man, quoted by St. Paul in Galatians 3.
A fantastic essay from Zac Koons, including this stellar line: “The rapid creep of AI into every nook and cranny of life represents a golden opportunity for our churches to grow and flourish. All we have to do is not use it.”
