The safety of home, the allure of afar: … modern everyday culture ceaselessly evokes and reproduces these two promises. Home improvement stores, flower shops, and furniture stores assure us that we can design our own homes in such a way that they begin to sing, while travel agencies and real estate brokers inform us that the world sings somewhere else. And at a secondary level, local history guides, travel memoirs, sentimental dramas of the countryside (Heimatfilme), and documentaries about German emigrants starting new lives abroad all likewise suggest that responsive segments of world indeed exist.
The hope of finding such a segment of world — or, rather, of establishing a relation of resonance to a segment of world — is by no means limited to physical space alone, but extends just as well to the social world. Find your home! as an imperative of modernity may well [363] mean first and foremost: Find people with whom you can enter into a resonant relationship. The social embeddedness of modern subjects is no longer a priori predetermined along estates-based or class lines or by traditional or conventional commitments such as arranged marriages. The psychosocial and psycho-emotional basis of social association in the private realm is rather formed by the notion that every subject has both the right and the responsibility to seek out and find friends and romantic partners who want and are able to enter into affirming, productive, lasting responsive relationships with them. Love and friendship have changed shape in modernity, in that they are now directly understood as resonant relationships and have become the social responsibility of the individual.
These two paragraphs set up this extraordinary, and (dare I call it?) convicting, insight and metaphor:
Modern society is thus characterized by the fact that it demands that those who live in it move through social space as seismographs of resonance, establishing social bonds when and where they are mutually called or addressed, i.e. where there is a “spark” between the participants in an interaction. The idea, at least, is that intense private social relationships are thus freed of estates-based, ritual, courtly, or religious stipulations and instead conceived as pure relationships of resonance. The fact that late modern subjects are clearly increasingly inclined to enter into partnerships and friendships with people who are like them as opposed to those who are “other” (sociostructurally or in terms of cultural or social background) does not necessarily contradict the criterion of resonance. They expect successful relationships from and are more likely to feel addressed by people who are similar to them. From a diagnostic perspective, this behavior could, however, also be read as an indication that subjects under late modern conditions tend to steer clear of what is genuinely other. They seek out harmony and consonance and avoid dissonance — though at the price of confusing harmony for resonance and thus forfeiting the possibility of adaptive transformation. Not unlike those potentially depressive types who keep their homes immaculately clean and smelling of flowers, they are at risk of moving in environments that are beautiful, but do not speak.
— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, 362–63. As the meme goes: “I’m in this picture and I don’t like it.”
Sketch for a longer reflection: St. Paul’s supposedly negative statements about the Law are in fact positive summaries, drawn from considering the narrative of Scripture in the retrospective light of Christ’s death and resurrection, of what the Law must have been meant for in the first place.
A genius little summary from St. Irenaeus, near the close of his great book, of the seven essentials (as he sees it) we receive from the tradition:
[The] path of those belonging to the Church circumscribes the whole world, as possessing the sure tradition from the apostles, and gives unto us to see that the faith of all is one and the same, since all receive one and the same God the Father, and believe in the same dispensation regarding the incarnation of the Son of God, and are cognizant of the same gift of the Spirit, and are conversant with the same commandments, and preserve the same form of ecclesiastical constitution, and expect the same advent of the Lord, and await the same salvation of the complete man, that is, of the soul and body. … For the Church preaches the truth everywhere, and she is the seven-branched candlestick which bears the light of Christ.
— Against Heresies, V.20.1. The seven marks of catholic orthodoxy: eternal Father, incarnate Son, outpoured Spirit, dominical instruction, ecclesial structure, second coming, physical† salvation.
In the dogmatic and theological history of every age, not excluding that of Protestantism, secular factors have played a part which tends to cover over all else. For all the gloating with which it was done, it was a good thing that the work of Pietism and the Enlightenment in Church History established so incontrovertibly the fact that even in such periods of supreme decision as that in which the dogma of the Trinity arose the history of the Church was anything but a history of heroes and saints. Yet in this case we should be just and perceptive and allow that not only the Church of Byzantium but also that of Wittenberg and Geneva, and finally the purest Church of any of the quiet in the land, have always and everywhere been, when examined at close range, centres of frailties and scandals of every kind, and that on the basis of the Reformation doctrine of justification at all events it is neither fitting nor worth while to play off the worldliness of the Church against the seriousness of the insights it has perhaps gained in spite of and in this worldliness. The same may be said about the indisputable connexion of the dogma with the philosophy of the age. By proving philosophical involvement we can reject the confessions and theology of any age and school, and we can do this the more effectively the less we see the beam in our own eye. For linguistically theologians have always depended on some philosophy and linguistically they always will. But instead of getting Pharisaically indignant about this and consigning whole periods to the limbo of a philosophy that is supposed to deny the Gospel—simply because our own philosophy is different—it is better to stick strictly to the one question what the theologians of the earlier period were really trying to say in the vocabulary of their philosophy. Caution is especially demanded when we insist on differences in the so-called piety of different periods and therefore claim that the piety out of which the dogma of the Trinity arose was completely different from our own piety with its sober focus, as they said some years ago, on “worldview and morality.” What right have we to regard our own piety, even if its agreement with the Reformation and the New Testament seem ever so impeccable, as the only piety that is possible in the Church, and therefore to exalt it as a standard by which to measure the insights of past ages? Let us be sure of our own cause so far as we can. But antithetical rigidity especially in evaluating the subjective religion of others is something against which we can only issue a warning.
There is much hype afoot about LLMs now being suitable “research assistants” or “writing companions” for serious humanistic work, so I decided to take a temperature check by asking Claude (what I took to be) a fairly basic historical theology research question:
What is the best English edition of St. Augustine’s Enchiridion?
The Enchiridion, a short, late catechetical work, is perhaps one of that Father’s less well-known works today — it lacks the name recognition of, say, the Confessions or the City of God — but is nevertheless one of his most continuously influential works throughout church history. I had a hunch there might be a handful, but not a plethora, of translations. So I asked Claude to help me out.
You can read the ensuing hilarity here. Spoiler alert: It did not go well.
Disclaimers: I have not ponied up $20/month to Anthropic, so I ran this little experiment on Claude Sonnet 4 (rather than the supposedly Pro-level Opus 4, a “powerful, large model for complex challenges”; apparently I overestimated what a “complex challenge” this actually was). Now for the scorecard. Claude:
got everything right about the NPNF translation by J. F. Shaw (which, being public domain, I imagine was actually part of its training data);
misidentified the editor (Boniface Ramsey, O. P.) as the translator of the New City Press edition, and was unable to find the translator’s name (which I found in moments by following one of the links which Claude provided me);
initially overlooked the Library of Christian Classics version translated by Albert Outler and published in 1955, and then required additional prompting to discover that the 1955 edition was, in fact, the same as the Outler edition;
and completely invented not one but two(!) translations: one by Thomas Williams, who at least is a known translator of St. Augustine, and one by Mark Dever, who is not.
For now, I think, I will be sticking to my old and LLM-less research habits.
UPDATE: Ian Harber — who has ponied up for Claude Pro — tasked Sonnet 4 with the same prompt, but in Research mode, and it generated what appears to be a largely accurate and, I admit, pretty useful report; I learned from it about a couple of older translations which actually exist (though are largely unavailable). It does, however, offer some peculiar comments, e.g., “The market [for translations of the Enchiridion] shows stability around current major editions rather than competitive innovation” — a comment I would not expect to find in a research guide written by, you know, an actual human historian. Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that my humorous little experiment with the free, non-Research version did not give me an accurate sense of Claude’s current capabilities, and I stand appropriately corrected.
The principal question remains, of course, not whether one can but whether one should use even the more powerful and capable tools for humanistic research. About this we have much to say, and we may try to explain it later…
The superscription of Psalm 51 links that most famous and gut-wrenching of repentance Psalms directly to David’s sin concerning Bathsheba and Uriah. Verses 1–17 are relentlessly first-person singular, with one English translation containing thirty-two instances of I, me, my, and so forth. Verse 4, “Against you, you only, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight” — a stumbling block for contemporary readers, who are here inclined to wonder, “Hasn’t David sinned against Bathsheba and Uriah, too?” — represents a radical narrowing of focus such that David’s sin is, at least for the moment of this Psalm, entirely viewed from within a single I-Thou relation. David reflects that God “will not be delighted in sacrifice, or I would give it; you will not be pleased with a burnt offering.” Rather, “a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” (He has learned well the lesson which his predecessor failed to grasp.)
Then the Psalm concludes on a completely different note, seemingly in a completely different voice: “Do good to Zion in your good pleasure; build up the walls of Jerusalem; then will you delight in right sacrifices, in burnt offerings and whole burnt offerings; then bulls will be offered on your altar.” What is the deal?
I am not usually one for speculative text-critical historical reconstructions, but in this case these last two verses (18–19 in ETs) sure seem like a later supplementation to an originally shorter text. And if that is the case, it must be said that the editors have not tried very hard to disguise the addition. There is no attempt to inhabit David’s point of view, or even make many explicit verbal links. Indeed, the underlying plot of the appendix seems quite different than the underlying plot of the main Psalm. So one wonders if the discontinuity is, in fact, the point. The “seam” in the text draws the attentive reader’s eye, and sets him or her thinking on how one tragic situation — David’s adultery with (and abuse of power over) Bathsheba, compounded by his murder of Uriah — may illustrate, elucidate, or analogize the situation of Israel’s idolatry and subsequent destruction. One might hear, in the plea to “build up the walls of Jerusalem,” an echo of the post-exilic situation of Ezra and Nehemiah, in which right sacrifices have long ceased because the Temple and the walls have been destroyed. I imagine there are many fruitful connections to draw.
This leads me to one further point of canonical interest. Many of the Prophets (Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in particular) develop the metaphor of Israel as God’s unfaithful wife, with the exile coming as long-overdue punishment for her adultery. If I am right that in the appendix to Psalm 51 we are to hear a correlation with the exile, with David standing for sinful and punished Israel, this is one of the only examples I can think of in which the Biblical commentary on the exile flips that gendered dynamic. Instead of a (variously) promiscuous or easily-seduced woman, Israel is here cast as — in the person of David — an abusive, murderous man.
I have written suspiciously little about music for a blog entitled “Program Notes”. Well, last week — May 7, to be exact — was Johannes Brahms’s birthday (happy 192nd, Johannes!), so it seems a fitting moment to write down some thoughts I have had floating around for a while.
Brahms occupies a curious place in Western musical history. Among the pantheon of “great composers,” he is perhaps the first who was not self-consciously an innovator. (Perhaps Mozart is a counter-example? But if in his youthful period one hears nothing but an almost uncanny perfecting of the Classical style, the mature works of his final decade disclose a latent genius for musical innovation that at times nearly shatters the mold; as with Schubert, one can only imagine how different music would have been had he been given more time.) During his own lifetime Brahms was known as a notable musical conservative, a protégé of the Schumanns and an inheritor of the Beethoven legacy, in contrast to the self-consciously progressive and experimental followers of Liszt (especially Wagner) — the (hyperbolically) so-called “War of the Romantics.” There is no single genre with which he is singularly identified, which he can be said to have (re)invented, transformed, or redefined — unlike Mozart with the opera, Schubert with the song cycle, Liszt with the tone poem, Mahler with the symphony, or Beethoven with pretty much everything (but especially the symphony and the string quartet). Nor is there an instrument whose technique is distinctively and permanently marked by his influence — unlike Bach for the violin and the keyboard, Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt for the modern piano, or Mendelssohn and Wagner (quite differently from one another) for orchestration. His style pays constant homage to Bach’s finely tuned counterpoint, Haydn’s sense of proportion, Beethoven’s ear for the dramatic flair, and Schumann’s expressive melody; but it is hard to say, whatever it might mean to say it, that in any of these areas he “improves” upon his forebears.
Part of all this, no doubt, is that Brahms was a notorious perfectionist — spending nearly twenty years writing and rewriting his First Symphony, and burning the manuscripts of more than a dozen string quartets he considered inadequate. But one can equally say of “perfectionism” that it is an unwillingness to measure oneself by any standards that transcend or relativize those one is given. The First Symphony, after all, took twenty years because it had to be worthy to publish after Beethoven’s Ninth (a burden which Schumann and Mendelssohn had notably not felt). Beethoven’s sheer artistic self-belief (and self-regard) was what permitted him to dispense with the artistic conventions he inherited from Haydn and Mozart, and every great composer after Beethoven considered that to be truly great one must at least try to be like Beethoven in this respect. Every great composer, that is, except for Brahms. He alone seemed to think it worthy to simply and creatively conserve the traditions he inherited, offering to posterity a handful of finely polished gems in which, like the Silmarils of Fëanor, the light of now-past ages is caught and distinctively refracted. And a small handful indeed: in the genres which his great forebears had seen, or had come to be seen, as offering special artistic statements — the string quartet, the piano trio, the piano sonata, and above all the symphony — he left just a few pieces each: string quartets three, piano trios three, piano sonatas three, and symphonies four. If there is a genre in which he was, perhaps, the greatest “innovator” of his day, it is that genre which most self-consciously honors the past: the theme and variations.
All this may sound curiously negative, as though I am suggesting (as Richard Strauss said about himself) that Brahms is “not a first-rate composer, but a first-class second-rate composer.” Not so. Brahms, in his totality, is certainly greater than Strauss (who, as the Brits say, routinely over-eggs the pudding a bit — though that masterpiece of his twilight years, the Vier letzte Lieder, deserves to stand in the first rank). The best passages in Brahms are as transcendently great as anything in Beethoven or Mozart. I am thinking, specifically, of the last five minutes (102 bars) in the first movement of the First Piano Concerto, though there is any number of passages I could spotlight. This movement, and this passage in particular, exemplifies all the best qualities of his writing: the organic expansion of just one or two simple musical cells into a vast whole; a remarkable economy of both counterpoint (there are rarely more than two separate lines moving simultaneously) and orchestration (somehow creating a full, sustained sound without Wagnerian orchestral busy-work); judicious exploitation of the flexible, propulsive rhythms available in his long triple meter, keeping the energy flowing through long yet elegantly balanced melodic lines; and the perfectly seamless, almost invisibly prepared transition from the calm light of the second theme to the darkness of the coda (at bar 438, 22:03 in the above linked recording), like a great cloud slowly obscuring the face of the Sun. There is nothing pretentious, nothing self-serious, nothing indulgent in Brahms. Everything is heartfelt, often even passionate, but utterly sincere. Where Mozart’s music sounds effortless, almost too perfect to be real, and Beethoven’s music sounds immensely effortful, every note as if written with blood — well, Brahms’s music sounds, simply, human: the music of human life, life as really lived, not as larger than life.
Now indulge me as I offer some speculation. In his masterpiece of criticism Real Presences (1989), George Steiner draws attention to the “broken contract” between logos and kosmos, immanent language and transcendent reality: the gulf (so he argues) at the heart of modern humanity’s sense of alienation. If there is no God, there is no “real presence” in anything we say: our words are meaningless. (Steiner himself was, notably, unable to believe in God: throughout Real Presences he writes of God and the transcendent as one who longs for but cannot himself have them.) And it was in the 1870s, Steiner suggests, that European critics and scholars began to advocate for detaching logos and kosmos. I am not even one-thousandth the expert on European arts and letters that Steiner was, but I cannot help noting that in the realm of music, this is precisely the period when tonality and tradition — the so-called “Common Practice” — begins to break down. Wagner’s “Tristan chord” (premiered 1865) is often seen as the touchstone for this development: the first public statement by a leading composer in a major work that the boundaries of tonality and the “rules” of voice-leading could be breached for the sake of expression. Of course, one is not terribly hard pressed to find Tristan-chord-like harmonies and resolutions in earlier composers (Schumann!), but it is hard to deny that there is something… flagrant? iconoclastic? Promethean? in the use Wagner there makes of it. And in any case, the floodgates opened in the 1870s and onward — with Verdi, Franck, Saint-Saëns, and Mussorgsky (all born before 1850) following Wagner in preparing the ground for really major innovations by Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, and Strauss (born after 1850) within a just-barely-tonal paradigm. By the beginning of the 20th century, Ravel and Scriabin were conjuring essentially non-tonal landscapes, and Schoenberg was developing the twelve-tone paradigm by which he sought to banish the concept of a single tonal center from his music — a deliberate repudiation of kosmos in favor of (a highly mathematical and schematized notion of) logos. All that was (apparently) solid melted, in the course of a few decades, into air.
And it is in precisely those decades, in the midst of so much musical chaos, that we find Brahms at work. He is a son of his age, not of some other age; he is not, and cannot be, a mere repristinator. But he is that son not as an innovator, but as a creative conserver, aware of how rich is his inheritance and seeking to make good use of it. What we hear in Brahms is always something new, but never something novel. Perhaps this is the way — the only way? — to flourish in modernity.
Life-works left resonantly unfinished at their creators’ deaths: St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae; Karl Barth’s Kirchliche Dogmatik; W. A. Mozart’s Requiem; J. S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge.
Our dogmatic labours can and should be guided by results which are venerable because they are attained in the common knowledge of the Church at a specific time. Such results may be seen in the dogmas enshrined in the creeds. But at no place should these replace our [16] dogmatic labours in virtue of their authority. Nor can it ever be the real concern of dogmatics merely to assemble, repeat and define the teaching of the Bible… Exegetical theology investigates biblical teaching as the basis of our talks about God. Dogmatics, too, must constantly keep it in view. But only in God and not for us is the true basis of Christian utterance identical with its true content. Hence dogmatics as such does not ask what the apostles and prophets said but what we must say on the basis of the apostles and prophets. This task is not taken from us because it is first necessary that we should know the biblical basis.
— Karl Barth, CD I/1, 15–16. I have often seen the bolded sentence criticized as reinscribing the “broad and ugly ditch” between Scripture and theology (“Barth thinks you shouldn’t just accept the theology taught by the Biblical writers!”). But it cannot be decontextualized in that sense. There is a distinction operative for Barth, which he has already laid out, between “exegetical theology,” or biblical theology, and dogmatic theology (as well as practical theology: see pp. 4–5). Biblical theology does precisely ask what the Biblical writers taught. Dogmatic theology, in contrast, is the self-critical reflection by the Church on what she teaches: a task which for Barth requires continual return to and testing by the biblical writers, which takes seriously the fact that there is historical difference and development since the time of the apostles and prophets (not all of it benign), and which is never — can, this side of the eschaton, never be — complete.