where we're headed

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.

-- John Maynard Keynes

Waste?

I didn't become a mathematician because mathematics was so full of beautiful and difficult problems that one might waste one's power in pursuing them without finding the central question.

-- Albert Einstein

Gilson paragraph

Perhaps it will not be out of place here to dissipate a misconception recently become current and likely to become more so with the general growth of interest in mediaeval philosophy. The Middle Ages that first appeared over the historical horizon was the Middle Ages of the romantics, a stirring, picturesque and brightly coloured world where saints and sinners jostled familiarly in the crowd, a world which expressed its deepest aspirations in architecture, sculpture and poetry. And that, too, is the Middle Ages of symbolism, where realities dissolved into the mystical meanings with which they were charged by artists and thinkers, so that the book of nature became a sort of Bible with things for words. Bestiaries, Mirrors of the World, stained glass, cathedral porches, each in its own way expressed a symbolic universe in which things, taken in their very essences, are merely so many expressions of God. But by a very natural reaction the study of the classical systems of the thirteenth century led historians to oppose to this poetical vision of the mediaeval world, the scientific and rational conception that presented itself in the writings of Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon and St. Thomas Aquinas. And this was entirely justifiable, in this sense at least, that from the thirteenth century onwards the universe of science begins to interpose between ourselves and the symbolic universe of the early Middle Ages; but it would be wrong to suppose that it suppressed it or even tended to suppress it. What really then took place was this: first, things, instead of being nothing more than symbols, became concrete beings which, above and beyond their own proper nature, were still charged with symbolic significances; and then, next the analogy of the world to God, instead of being expressed only on the place of imagery and feeling, was now formulated in precise laws and definite metaphysical conceptions. God in fact penetrated more deeply into nature as the depths of nature became better known. For a Bonaventure, for instance, there is no joy like the joy of contemplation of God as mirrored in the analogical structure of beings; and even the more sober mind of St. Thomas expresses, nevertheless, the same philosophy of nature when he reduces the efficacy of second causes to nothing but an analogical participation in the diving efficiency. Physical causality is to the act of creation what beings are to Being, and time to eternity. Thus, under whatever aspect we consider it, there exists in reality but one mediaeval vision of the world, whether it expresses itself now in words of art or now in defined philosophical concepts: that, namely, which St. Augustine drew with a master-hand in his De Trinitate, and which is directly referable to the words of the Book of Wisdom (xi. 21): omnia in mensura, et numero, et pondere disposuisti.

-- Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy

What Then?

I made a post of this poem a long time ago, can't remember when. It's been sort of haunting me recently... so here it is again.

What Then?

His chosen comrades thought at school
He must grow a famous man;
He thought the same and lived by rule,
All his twenties crammed with toil;
'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?'

Everything he wrote was read,
After certain years he won
Sufficient money for his need,
Friends that have been friends indeed;
'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?'

All his happier dreams came true -
A small old house, wife, daughter, son,
Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,
Poets and Wits about him drew;
'What then?' sang Plato's ghost. 'What then?'

'The work is done,' grown old he thought,
'According to my boyish plan;
Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,
Something to perfection brought';
But louder sang that ghost, 'What then?'

-- W. B. Yeats

Pärt article (from The Evangelist, the seasonal newsletter of St. Matthew's Church, Newport Beach)

While the Music Lasts
Some thoughts on the art of Arvo Pärt


For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or the music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

-- T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages


Arvo Pärt is arguably the greatest living composer of serious music. Born in Estonia on September 11th, 1935, and raised amidst the dreariness of Soviet occupied Europe, he made a name for himself while studying composition at the Tallinn Conservatory. The powers-that-were did not appreciate his overly Western sounding music, and early in his career he received official censures from the state. He eventually left Estonia in 1980 and currently lives in Berlin, where he composes under the friendlier auspices of the German government and people.

Pärt’s music is popularly described as ‘mystical’ or ‘spiritual’ minimalism. While hackneyed descriptions of this kind are likely to raise the eyebrows of most sensible people, they are surprisingly appropriate in the case of Pärt. He himself is a deeply religious man, and his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy in 1975 marks a kind of artistic conversion and the beginning of his defining work. In the words of his wife: “if you want to understand my husband’s music, read the Church Fathers”.

His style is a characteristic blend of ancient and modern forms. Whether recalling the stately plainchant of the Middle Ages, the transcendent polyphony of Josquin, or the immaculate fugues of Bach, centuries of musical tradition shape his compositions. He exemplifies what T.S. Eliot called the ‘historical sense’. Pärt writes “not simply with his own generation in his bones”, but a “sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together.” [1] He looks to unite the past and the present in artistic expression, to transfix the timeless moment in time.

Probably best known for his choral works, Pärt places great emphasis on language and texts. “Words write music”, he often says. Language has the power to shape ideas, enlarge sentiments, and color life in general; it also carries a spiritual dimension (think of the words in the Liturgy). These somewhat imperceptible aspects of language animate Pärt’s music. A good example is his setting of the Kanon Pokajanen, the 8th century Greco-Slavonic canon of repentance. To quote Pärt himself:

The Kanon has shown me how much the choice of language predetermines the character of a work, so much so, in fact, that the entire structure of the musical composition is subject to the text and its laws. [2]

The words must be allowed to find their own sound, according to him. In so doing, the text will find its own sound, just as the meaning of the text is a function of the meaning of the words. One might take the last movement of the Kanon (the Prayer after the Canon) as an illustration. The text begins by dwelling on subjects such as sin and the crucifixion. It ends in a more heavenly way, imploring admittance into the Lord’s “pasturage” and the nourishment of his “Holy Mysteries”. The choir is made to mirror this progression, beginning the prayer with gentle, unhurried, almost reluctant vocal lines that gradually ascend to harmonies of the most ethereal beauty. In this way, the music and the text come to form an organic whole. The sacred words are made incarnate, as it were, in the music. Beyond the mere utterance of the words, the timelessness of the text is translated into the present in the form of art.

This theme of timelessness can also be perceived in the use of ‘musical silence’. To quote Pärt again:

My music was always written after I had long been silent in the most literal sense of the word. When I speak of silence, I mean the ‘nothingness’ out of which God created the world. That is why, ideally, musical silence is sacred. [3]

Pärt’s scores are interspersed with moments of ‘nothingness’ or silence. In such moments he allows notes to ring-out to their fullest extent, giving the music a kind of spatial quality (his Te Deum is a nice example, where oftentimes what the violins are playing is not nearly as important as what the violins are not playing). It is like the intermittent sound of plainchant echoing through the walls of a spacious Medieval cathedral; the music, in a sense, leaves the present moment and unites with the illegible stones, sepulchers, and those individuals whom they commemorate.

However, it should be remembered that silence by itself is meaningless, being simply the negation of sound. What Pärt emphasizes could be called a musical form apprehended in moments of silence or stillness. The temporal succession of thoughts and feelings that accompany the act of listening is momentarily suspended in the stillness, leaving the music spread-out before the mind like a geometric object. Time seems to stand still in the form of the music. T.S. Eliot, who discusses frequently the subject of timelessness in his poetry, explains this phenomenon as follows:

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now [4]

On perhaps a deeper level, it could be said that silence is to music what ‘aridity’ or ‘darkness’ is to the spiritual life. God in his essence is so far beyond human understanding that sometimes the most appropriate way to approach him is through the negation of worldly things, the senses, or even reason. The soul must be purged of temporal considerations to the point of aridity. This is the so-called via negativa, famously articulated in the 5th century writings of Pseudo-Dionysius.

The ‘negative way’ had an enormous influence on the spirituality of the Eastern Church -- and by default the spiritual life of our composer. It was not until the late Middle Ages that vernacular translations of Pseudo-Dionysius brought the via negativa to the full attention of the West. Following this trend, the 16th century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross wrote about the ‘dark night’ of the soul. According to him “the soul departs from all created things, in its affection and operation, by means of this night and marches on toward eternal things.” [5] Once this dark, arid place has been reached the soul is like a clean slate, ready to receive God’s grace in its simplicity and power. St. John quotes often from Scripture in reference to spiritual aridity: “in a desert land, without water, dry, and without a way, I appeared before You to be able to see Your power and Your glory.” [6]

Returning to Pärt, we find in his music strains of the via negativa. Musical compositions are oftentimes so fraught with technical considerations (e.g., instrumentation, theory) that the beauty of an individual note or a melody is lost in the commotion. Pärt begins with a clean slate of silence -- he even named one of his instrumental compositions Tabula Rasa -- and allows himself only the simplest of tools to work with: scales, triads, voices. The composer calls his style ‘Tintinnabulation’, after the bell-like sound made by the tonal triad. He thinks of it in the following way:

Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements -- with one voice, with two voices. I build with the most primitive materials -- with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of the triad are like bells. [7]

Pärt’s music should not be separated from his Christian principles, as illustrated above. His art is brilliant on many different levels, but this would be nothing without the spirituality of the composer. Indeed, art itself is a function of the spiritual faculties of the artist. It is called, in the precise language of St. Thomas, a ‘virtue’ of the practical intellect: a kind of habit of the intellectual soul or spirit [8]. The soul of the artist subsumes both the efficient and the formal cause of his art. If the soul is redeemed and animated by grace, then it will readily produce art that bears the same mark [9]. It is not surprising, then, that Pärt often spends years in silence, prayer, and contemplation before composing. He wants his soul to be properly ordered before creating. As the soul draws nearer to God, artistic creation becomes more a reflection of divine creation. The Christian artist is ideally a type of mystic, and his art is evidence of his participation in the life of God.

Christianity is thus a creative force to Pärt. Following the quotes above, he looks to make music out of silence in a way that is analogous to God’s act of creation ex nihilo, and just as the creation was brought forth through the Word (St. Augustine goes so far as to say the Word is “like the art of Almighty God” [10]), his art consists in creating through the sacred words and traditions of the Church. Everywhere his music bears similar imprints of the Christian soul. He is fond of comparing, for example, the melodic voice and the triadic voice that constitute Tintinnabulation to theological notions such as sin and divine forgiveness (respectively). The former voice is a picture of the temporal world, and the latter voice is a picture of the eternal world, both intersecting at the "moment in and out of time".

In some sense listening to Pärt is like not listening to music at all, but “you are the music”. That is, you belong to a different, eternal world and the music is hinting at your true identity. This power of art to fuse the timeless with time, ultimately, points us towards the Incarnation. It is not always easy to apprehend the ‘Word made flesh’ -- the most important instance of the timeless fusing with time -- in everyday life. Noise, commotion, and above all sin tend to get in the way. Pärt, in his uniquely artistic way, encourages us to break this tendency. The Word incarnate in his music is a picture of the Word incarnate in us.

Recommended Recordings

Instrumental: Tabula Rasa / Fratres / Symphony No. 3; Gil Shaham (violin), Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi (conductor); Deutsche Grammophon, 1999.

Vocal: Te Deum / Silouan’s Song / Magnificat / Berlin Mass; Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Tallinn Chamber Orchestra, Tõnu Kaljuste (conductor); ECM New Series, 1993.






[1] T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent.
[2] CD liner notes, ECM recording of Kanon Pokajanen.
[3] CD liner notes, Deutsche Grammophon recording of Tabula Rasa.
[4] T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.
[5] St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night.
[6] Ps. 63:2-3.
[7] CD liner notes, ECM recording of Tabula Rasa.
[8] Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 57.
[9] Ibid., Q. 55, A. 2, unumquodque enim quale est, talia operator.
[10] De Trinitate, book VI, X.11, ars quaedam omnipotentis atque sapientis dei.

Art in the 15th century

Art was still an integral part of life during that age. Life was shaped by strong forms and held together and measured by the sacraments of the church, the annual sequence of festivals, and the divisions of the day. The labors and joys of life all had their fixed forms: religion, knighthood, and courtly Minne provided the most important of these forms. Art had the task of embellishing the forms in which life was lived with beauty. What was sought was not art itself, but the beautiful life. In contrast to later ages, one did not step outside a more or less indifferent daily routine in order to enjoy art in solitary contemplation for the sake of solace or edification; rather, art was used to intensify the splendor of life itself. It is the destiny of art to vibrate in concert with the high points of life, be it in the highest flights of piety or in the proudest enjoyment of earthly moments. During the Middle Ages art was not yet perceived as beauty per se. It was for the most part applied art, even in cases where we would consider the works to be their own reason for being. That is to say, for the Middle Ages, the reason for desiring a given work of art rested in its purpose, rested in the fact that artworks are the servants of any one of the forms of life. In cases where, disregarding any practical uses, the pure ideal of beauty guides the creating artist himself, this happen to a large part subconsciously. The first sprouts of a love for art for its own sake appear as a wild growth on the production of art: princes and noblemen piled up objects of art until they became collections; this rendered them useless: they were then enjoyed as curiosities, as precious parts of the princely treasury. The actual sense of art that arises during the Renaissance has this foundation.

-- Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages

Folk Piety

A powerful religion permeates all the affairs of life and lends color to every movement of the spirit, to every element of culture.

In time, of course, those things come to react upon religion, and indeed its living core may be stifled by the ideas and images it once took into its sphere. The "sanctification of all the concerns of life" has its fateful aspect.

[...]

Now, no religion has ever been quite independent of the culture of its people and its time. It is just when religion exercises sovereign sway through the agency of literally written scriptures, when all life seems to revolve round that centre, "when it is interwoven with life as a whole," that life will most infallibly react upon it. Later, these intimate connections with culture are no longer useful to it, but simply a source of danger; nevertheless, a religion will always act in this way as long as it is alive.

-- Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen

Rhineland, October 6-17

Trap for logicians

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

-- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Scripture and Tradition

Thirdly, there survives definite evidence that the meaning of the Bible was consciously sought in relation to its context in Christian institutions. If the Bible supplied a critical background for all Christian teaching, as in fact it did, it had in turn a background of its own, by reference to which it could itself be criticised. This second and remoter background was the continuity of Christian practice, or, as we might say nowadays, the cultural history of Christianity from the most primitive times. The Fathers did not distinguish very clearly between practices which were really primitive and others of somewhat later introduction. They had little or none of the modern sense of evolutionary development, and saw no reason for a clean-cut separation in thought between the character of an institution in its rudimentary germ and that of the same institution in a fully developed form. Their expositions of cultural history are therefore not reliable; they always need to be checked. But since they recognised in the Bible itself something which the Church had instituted -- at any rate, before the New Testament could begin to shape the thought of the Church it had itself had to be put into shape by the Church -- it is wholly to their credit that they also recognised the need for comparing its witness with that of the other great formative contributions of the apostolic and subapostolic Church to spiritual order and discipline -- that is, in particular, the sacraments, the creeds, and the episcopate. The Bible was the fullest, the readiest, and the most authoritative witness, simply because its evidence was expressed in words, and littera scripta manet. But it did not stand alone, nor could the Church, in expounding its Bible, reasonably bring the exposition into conflict with the testimony of its other great primitive heritages. They were all alike regarded as tradition.

[...]

Basil, archbishop of another Caesarea, in Cappadocia, was the father of Eastern monasticism, as Benedict was of Western. He it was who by his efforts accomplished as much as any one in reconciling conservative theology to the more penetrating doctrine of Athanasius and the Nicene Creed. His recognition of the doctrinal pre-eminence of the Bible is amply expressed in a passage in which he is maintaining the consistency of his own teaching with that of previous theological leaders: but, he continues, "this does not satisfy me, that it is the tradition of the fathers: they too followed the sense of Scripture, taking their principles from those passages which I have just quoted to you from Scripture" (de Spir. sanct. 16). Yet he too, and in the same treatise, makes a great point of the importance of evidence drawn from cultural sources. "Of the subjects of conviction and preaching maintained in the Church," he writes, "our possession of some is derived from the written teaching, but our reception of others comes by private transmission from the apostles' tradition: both these kinds have the same force for religion." He goes on to enumerate a wealth of instances of "unwritten customs", including the following: making the sign of the cross, turning to the east in prayer, the full text of the consecration prayers in the liturgy, the benediction of the baptismal water and the oil, and the very use of chrism and finally the actual formula of the baptismal creed (de Spir. sanct. 66, 67). None of these things, he observes, is prescribed in Scripture, but all possess apostolic authority. And though we should be less ready than he was to ascribe them all without qualification to the actual ordinance of the apostles, he was so far right in appealing to them as that the same Church which formed the canon of the New Testament was engaged concurrently in establishing such customs.

-- G.L. Prestige, Tradition: the Scriptural Basis of Theology (from the Bampton Lectures for 1940)

Being a Christian

It is almost universally assumed to-day that becoming a Christian means in essence the adoption of a new set of beliefs or the initiation of a new mode of behaviour. A Christian would be defined as one who "believes in Christ" or "worships Christ" or "tries to follow Christ's teaching." Now it is far from my purpose to belittle either Christian dogma or Christian ethics. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that to define the essence of Christianity in terms either of belief or of practice involves the neglect of two principles that are fundamental to all sound theology. The former of these is that the act of God precedes and is presupposed by the acts of man: "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us"; "Ye have come to know God, or rather to be known of God". The second is that what a being is precedes what it does; our actions are a consequence of what we are, 'operari sequitur esse'. It will follow from this that the Christian should be defined not in terms of what he himself does, but of what God has made him to be. Being a Christian is an ontological fact, resulting from an act of God.

What, then, is this act by which God makes a man into a Christian? It is, the New Testament assures us, incorporation into the human nature of Christ, an incorporation by which the very life of the Man Christ Jesus is communicated to us and we are re-created in him. "I am the vine; ye are the branches"; "If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature," or "there is a new creation"; we have been "grafted into" Christ like shoots into a tree. The Christian is a man to whom something has happened, something moreover which is irreversible and which penetrates to the very roots of his being; he is a man who has been re-created in, and into, Christ.

-- Eric Mascall, Christ, the Christian, and the Church

Malleus Arianorum

It is a thing equally deplorable and dangerous, that there are as many creeds as opinions among men, as many doctrines as inclinations, and as many sources of blasphemy as there are faults among us; because we make creeds arbitrarily, and explain them as arbitrarily. The Homoousion is rejected, and received, and explained away by successive synods. The partial or total resemblance of the Father and of the Son is a subject of dispute for these unhappy times. Every year, nay, every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries. We repent of what we have done, we defend those who repent, we anathematize those whom we defended. We condemn either the doctrine of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others; and reciprocally tearing one another to pieces, we have been the cause of each other's ruin.

-- St. Hilary of Poitiers (300-367 AD)

Good old days

Somebody had told me that humble travellers in Holland could doss down in police stations, and it was true... They even gave me a bowl of coffee and a quarter of a loaf before I set off. Thank God I had put 'student' in my passport: it was an amulet and an Open Sesame. In European tradition, the word suggested a youthful, needy, and earnest figure, spurred along the highways of the West by a thirst for learning -- thus, notwithstanding high spirits and a proneness to dog-Latin drinking songs, a fit candidate for succor.

-- Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time for Gifts

My new life

Ascension

"At that time: Jesus appeared unto the eleven disciples as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief adn hardness of heart." (Mark 16:14)

The weakness of disciples at this time was to become power unto all of us, (if I may be permitted to say such a thing,) in all that concerned their slowness to believe in the Lord's resurrection. In consequence of their doubts, the fact of the resurrection was demonstrated by many infallible proofs. These proofs we read and acknowledge. What then assureth our faith, if not their doubt? Mary Magdalene, who soon believed, did less for me than Thomas, who doubted long. Because of his doubting, he was asked to touch the scars of the wounds, and thus was healed any wound of doubt in our hearts.

-- St. Gregory the Great