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Posted by Laon on May 31, 1999 at 21:06:17:
In Reply to: Hallelujah! posted by Carsten on May 31, 1999 at 15:20:35:
Yes, that's true about the music directed at the Christian god. And I must admit that I don't understand the way it works, emotionally, at either end of the transaction.
I think that many kinds of Christianity, and no doubt other religions, say that humans have a duty to praise God. I must admit I don't understand why. I'd have thought that if people believe in a god, so they think it's something that exists, like a mountain or another person, only on a vaster scale, then, as we do with anything that exists, they'd go through a range of feelings about it: gratitude, but also anger, indifference, fear, hate, love, envy, sympathy, and so on.
But religious music, like prayer, generally only expresses praise, which is a form of gratitude. So it's a kind of self-presentation. The person praising their god is presenting themself to that god in a certain monotonal way, which expresses a rather rigid personality, which is not what that person is actually like.
But people often say they enjoy prayer, and feel refreshed by it, so that perhaps its a matter of forming a grateful, praising, state of mind as a mental exercise, a form of yoga.
From the other side of the transaction, I can't see why a god would want to be praised, especially incessantly, let alone think that it's a duty for humans on a small planet round an insignificant star in the outer spiral arm of a small and no doubt low-rent galaxy. Unless it's a local god that only operates near the Earth or even part of the Earth. Is it a sort of psychic vampirism, that the gods need this kind of mental energy from humans in order to continue to excist, in which case prayer is a duty if you think some god exists and you want it to continue to do so. A benevolent god, like that described in Leigh Hunt's poem "Abou ben Adam", would consider that the best way to show good faith would be to love thy fellow creatures (Hunt said "fellow man", but that's starting to sound odd now; and he'd say creatures or people or something now).
Or Coleridge's "He prayeth best who loveth best" from the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, though come to think of it, that specific line may have been one of the lines added to the poem by Wordsworth.
But then there's Blake. Here's an angry and contemptuous poem addressed by William Blake to the Christian god, in which he believed and which he strongly defended on other occasions:
*To nobodaddy*
Why art thou silent & Invisible,
Father of Jealousy?
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching Eye?
Why darkness and obscurity
In all thy words & laws,
That none dares eat the fruit but from
The wily serpents jaws?
Or is it because Secresy gains
females' loud applause?
Wm Blake
It seems a reasonable question, though in another mood Blake might say that "reason" is exactly what's wrong with it. But why should a god not receive anger, questioning, and a whole lot of other things as well as praise? I don't know. Certainly the incessant praise makes religious poetry rather a dull genre, to me, with the main exception of some of Donne's stuff: "Batter my heart, three person'd God" from the "Holy Sonnets" is a real poem, though it seems to have as much about and ual surrender in it as religious feeling. Or rather it's the mix of both that makes it interesting.
And there is a danger, that Carsten points out, in the emotional monotony of religious music, and also poetry. I suspect that people don't read much purely devotional poetry unless it involves conflict like that expressed in Donne's religious poetry, or in the Blake poem quotred above.
And what's happened to some of the great religious music is a warning of the dangers of excessive blandness. Because of course it's started selling in bucketloads lately, chanting monks, Mes, and so on. But the people aren't actually buying it to listen to, or give a second's thought to the content. They're using it as New Age background music, something that gives off a calming ambience, like a quiet beige wallpaper.
The music that's saved from that degradation is the music that contains strong, anguished emotions, like Bach's St John Pion ("Ach mein Sinn, wo wilst du endlich hin") and St Matthew Pion ("Erbarme dich, mein Gott"). In my opinion Bach's "Erbarme dich" is one of the strongest arguments that has ever been raised for Christianity, or the Christian world-view.
The Good Friday music from Wagner's "Parsifal", though it uses Christian symbols, actually puts up a good emotional case for Buddhism, compion for all living things and so on. Perhaps it's admitting a touch of anguish ("Ach wehe!", sings Parsifal), of real feeling, that makes it more moving and involving.
(And the music aimed at Bad Gods, like the Christian Devil, is just as emotionally limited, or rather much more so. I doubt if anyone's yet devoted a really interesting poem or piece of music or other artwork as a "bad god".)
These issues, by the way, are I think important to Blake. I _think_ that it's something he wrestled with in his sometimes extremely puzzling poems.
Cheers!
Laon
And cheers to Cythna. I agree about Satanic posing being a kind of fake, commodified rebellion, empty of real content. If I get published at all, and there seems to be demand for it, there might be a Laon manifesto.