Sacred Music, Religious Desire and Knowledge of God

The Music of Our Human Longing

Julian Perlmutter

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350277953
• eBook ISBN: 9781350114982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Many people find sacred choral music profound and deeply evocative, even in societies that seem to be turning away from religious belief. In this book, Julian Perlmutter examines how, in light of its wide appeal, sacred music can have religious significance for people regardless of their religious convictions. By differentiating between doctrinal belief and the desire for God, Perlmutter explores a longing for the spiritual that is compatible with both belief and 'interested non-belief'. He describes how sacred music can elicit this kind of longing, thereby helping the listener to grow in religious openness. The work of Thomas Merton is also analyzed in order to show that musically-elicited desire for God can be incorporated into the Christian practice of contemplative prayer, aimed ultimately at a union of love with God. By exploring connections between desire, knowledge and religious practice, this engaging account illustrates how sacred music can have a transformative effect on one's wider spiritual life. Of particular interest to philosophers and theologians, the book makes a novel contribution to several topics including religious epistemology, the philosophy of emotion and aesthetics.

1

Introduction

This philosophical study unites three themes: religious non-belief, sacred music and religious desire. What primarily dictates this subject matter is the observation that sacred music – and specifically choral music in the Christian, Western classical tradition – has a peculiar capacity to strike a chord even in non-believers. ‘In today’s so-called secular society, sacred choral music is as powerful, compelling and popular as it has ever been’, writes Jonathan Arnold in a recent study.¹ David Pugmire, meanwhile, has observed that ‘sacred music seems to have a surprising power over unbelievers … to ply them … with what might be called devotional feelings’.² In newspaper articles we read of the continued popularity in Britain of choral services such as evensong, despite the country’s low levels of church attendance in general.³

What are we to make of all this? For a start, there are non-believers and there are non-believers. Even the most hardened atheist may recognize the beauty that sacred music can possess, without being at all interested in the music’s subject matter. On the other hand it is possible to be on the edges of religious adherence, neither believing nor disbelieving, yet retaining an interest in the teachings and practices of particular religious institutions. It is this sort of non-believer, whom I call the ‘interested non-believer’, that will be my concern in this study, although much of what I say will also apply to those who actively profess religious faith (and in any case, the line between the two can be blurry, with considerable variation in degrees of confidence, both between people and over the course of a single person’s life). In short, I will argue that for an interested non-believer, the deep appeal of sacred music can be a way into growing in religious openness: engaged with in a particular way, sacred choral music has the capacity to shape profoundly a person’s journey of religious inquiry. This is where the third of my key themes comes in: the way in which, I will argue, sacred music can do this is by helping the listener to cultivate religious desires of a certain kind. Religious desire, or more specifically the desire for God, is a natural focus for an investigation into ‘non-believing openness’, since a desire for God does not require a pre-existing belief that God is real. My central claim will be that through desiring God in response to sacred music in the way I shall describe, one can come to know something of what God would be like in satisfying the desire. Thus, if God is real and has (something like) this nature, then through the desire one knows about God, where this knowledge is imbued with a special, personal significance that shapes and sustains the religious quest. All this, I maintain, is possible for a non-believer.

The themes of sacred music and non-believing religious involvement have received increasing attention in recent philosophical literature, including the issue of their overlap: How, and to what extent, can a non-believer fully engage with sacred music?⁴ The issue of religious desire has not seen as much explicit philosophical treatment, at least in the analytic tradition in which I am predominantly based. Yet the emotions more generally in religious life have been the focus of recent work – and the present study joins this emerging line of investigation. In particular, my underlying aim in what follows is to develop a religious ‘epistemology of involvement’, to use a phrase of John Cottingham:⁵ a form of epistemology based on the recognition that religious understanding, if there is such a thing, requires one to be open and receptive, and that a programme of sustained religious praxis and affective response is needed in order to cultivate the receptivity in question. Hence, the epigraph at the start of Chapter 2 is quite deliberately placed: the whole study can be understood as picking up this thread of Cottingham’s work and developing it in a particular way.

I have said that this study will be centred on desire for God in response to sacred music. However, only one chapter – Chapter 5 – discusses such responses in any detail in relation to the music itself. There are claims I need to establish in order for the arguments of that chapter to hold up, which I do in the first three chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the issue of sacred music and non-belief, the concept of interested non-belief that I will primarily be addressing and various aspects of desire that will be relevant in what follows. Chapter 3 establishes the epistemology of desire with which I will be working, in the context of more general considerations in the philosophy of emotion. Chapter 4 addresses the topic of music and affect, again with a view to the specific affect of desire that is my central concern. These chapters all feed into Chapter 5, which contains several in-depth musical illustrations of my central thesis. Finally, Chapter 6 examines the practice of Christian contemplative prayer in light of what will have gone before; in doing so, it provides both a theological context to the discussion and an account of how the form of religious involvement I will have articulated can be taken into a wider life of religious practice.

2

Sacred music, longing and openness

There is no promise that it will be easy. But this much, if we knew anything of human life, we knew already. There is no guarantee of the outcome … . But for some, as long as the music of our human longing calls us, … there will be no other path we can with integrity follow.

John Cottingham¹

2.1 Sacred music and religious desire: A real-life story

In Alf Gabrielsson’s Strong Experiences with Music, a collection of real-life accounts describing the effect of music on people’s lives, we read the following story. One afternoon in the mid-1990s, Ella, a student in Sweden, decides to visit the cathedral near her home. Every so often she likes to come here to gather her thoughts and gain some perspective on her studies, and to take joy in the beauty and history of the building. This afternoon, on entering the cathedral, she pauses to remove her backpack. Just as she unzips her jacket, her attention is caught by the sound of a melody, faint yet distinguishable. She raises her head to hear more clearly. Is she imagining it? No one else seems to be listening; yet Ella is sure that she can hear a song. It is, she establishes, a male choir singing a Gregorian chant of some kind. She has never heard anything so beautiful, and in an instant the melody has captured her attention totally, filling and enveloping her. It seems to be coming from the very top of the building, almost merging with the stone walls.

As Ella continues to listen, sorrow begins to wash over her. She thinks of her loved ones who are now gone, and of everyone who has lost someone dear to them; she knows she is not alone in feeling sorrow, and there is now crying building in her chest. As she walks further into the church, the melody pursues her; she can now hear it loud and clear – simultaneously sad and consoling, and unbearably beautiful. Looking around, Ella still cannot see who is singing. She arrives at a set of candleholders, and tears now start to roll down her cheeks. She lights two candles for her loved ones and for all those who are in sorrow. Her emotions guided by the music, a feeling of dreadful loneliness fills her, a feeling of smallness, vulnerability and despair. Yet as her crying abates, a new feeling arises in her: a desire to kneel and pray, to ask God for help in coping, in finding answers to the loneliness, in helping others in distress. The strong need to kneel and pray is confusing and even embarrassing, but the music fills her so completely that there is no room for anything else.

Continuing down the aisle, Ella discovers a small altar. Stopping to look at it, she wrestles with her unwillingness and uncertainty. She wants to kneel and pray, but is not sure that she can. Suddenly, she puts her bag down, walks to the altar and kneels. The music has drawn her to this posture, convincing her that it is the only proper thing; it has peeled all her obstacles away. She abandons herself completely to the singing, and prays for help. During her prayer, something happens: Ella’s loneliness and sorrow simply ease up and disappear, and a great calm settles in her. She becomes convinced that she is not alone, indeed, that she has never been alone. She rises slowly, filled with a completely new feeling of calmness and strength. After years of despair and seeking, Ella has a strong sense that she has arrived home.

The question of what it was that Ella heard remains unanswered. Yet it had a profound and lasting effect on her religious faith: she is now convinced of God’s reality, manifest to those who truly want and need him. Ella gained a new self-knowledge and self-esteem that day, which she will carry humbly with her for the rest of her life.²

2.2 Statement of aims: Non-believing openness

Music has the power to move us as little else can; and in this real-life account of a transformative experience involving sacred music and religious desire, we can see many of the themes with which this study will be concerned.³ Much of what I say in the following pages will apply to both religious believers and non-believers. However, my main goal will be to articulate a form of religious engagement that is possible and fruitful for what we might call ‘interested non-believers’ in relation to Christian theism: those who lack the belief that any of the theistic content in Christian doctrine is true,⁴ yet who have felt at one time or another a longing for the sacred or transcendent as represented in the language, thought and cultural heritage of the Christian tradition. In other words, I will primarily be addressing those in the situation in which Ella seems to find herself in the first part of the story, before her experience in prayer; and I suspect such a situation is not uncommon in the ‘secularized’ West, or North Atlantic world, today.⁵ Over the next five chapters, I will develop an answer to the following question: if one cannot believe that the God of Christian doctrine is real, how might one, nonetheless, remain open to the inestimable benefits that would be available if such a God were real – remain, that is, in a position that would conduce to one’s eventually being able to receive and live out those benefits? My answer is twofold. First, desires of a certain kind for God can give the desirer knowledge about God if he is real, which guides and enriches the religious quest. Second, in order to cultivate desires of this kind, one can engage in a particular way with sacred music in the Western classical tradition, taking that engagement into the practice of Christian prayer.⁶ However, although the desires in question can, indeed, be cultivated, I hope to show that they can also be manifestations of pervasive human longings and needs.

Ella’s story hints at the greater detail I will develop in answering the question of how a non-believer may cultivate openness to God. At the start of the story Ella is either a non-believer or a ‘half-believer’; at any rate, she is not a committed Christian. She is familiar and comfortable with aspects of her culture’s Christian heritage; yet from her confusion and embarrassment at the desire to kneel and pray, we see that she is not accustomed to fully fledged religious engagement: her life is not centred on a religious outlook. As she listens to the Gregorian chant, she comes to feel a deep dissatisfaction at the human condition – dissatisfaction arising from a new, vivid awareness of human vulnerability and the resultant, ever-present possibility of sorrow, loneliness and despair. The music, in eliciting this feeling of deep dissatisfaction, leads to a desire to reach out to God in prayer – a sense that nothing in the world could satisfy the need for help that she now feels. The beautiful, insistent melody, as well as eliciting in Ella the desire to reach out to God, helps her to do so, stripping away her obstacles of unwillingness, uncertainty and embarrassment. Finally, her time of prayer, infused with the beauty of the music, leads to a radical, lasting transformation of outlook – from loneliness and sorrow to calmness, strength and a sense of homecoming. Vital to this transformation is a newfound self-knowledge, which consists centrally in a sense of self-worth that she carries humbly, as though she recognizes that its source and significance lie outside of her.

I said I will examine the capacity of sacred music to elicit desires of a certain kind for God, and the role such desires can play in one’s life when taken into a sustained practice of prayer. More exactly, I will develop an epistemology of religious desire as experienced through sacred music in the Western classical tradition.⁷ Chapters 3 and 4 will establish the groundwork: in Chapter 3 I will argue for an epistemology of desire more generally, and in Chapter 4 I will argue that music can combine with other aspects of the listener’s experience to arouse emotions with extra-musical objects. Music’s capacity to combine with words and to be performed in a particular context makes it apt for eliciting affective responses that contain enough conceptual content to be relatively specific: a key epistemic feature of desire, as Chapter 3 will have established. Then, in Chapter 5, I will apply this groundwork to several musical examples. These examples are intended to illustrate sacred music’s capacity to elicit forms of desire for God that enable knowledge of the kind discussed in Chapter 3. Specifically, I will argue that through and in the musically elicited longing for God that I discuss, one can know in a personally significant way what God would have to be like in satisfying the desire. Thus, if God is real and is roughly as the desire characterizes him, then one knows something of what he is like in terms of his importance to oneself as the desirer – even in the absence of the desire’s satisfaction, and even without any belief that God is real.⁸ This may immediately raise the worry of wishful thinking: how can one know that God, if real, is roughly as one’s desires characterize him? I will look briefly at the issue at the end of this chapter, and will return to it in Chapters 3 and 6. Chapter 6 – the final chapter – will examine how the kinds of desire discussed in Chapter 5 can lead into a long-term practice of prayer within the Christian contemplative tradition, as represented in the work of the twentieth-century Cistercian monk Thomas Merton. Like Ella’s desire for God, the longing I shall discuss springs from sacred music’s ability to elicit in the listener a deep dissatisfaction with aspects of the human condition, which cannot be met by anything the world has to offer. I will argue that having this dissatisfaction is a natural way of being led into contemplative prayer as Merton presents it. One can hope that if the God to whom all this engagement points is real, then one will be shaped in contemplative pray...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sacred music, longing and openness
• 3 Desire and knowledge
• 4 Music and affect
• 5 Sacred music and knowledge by desire: The account applied
• 6 Religious desire and contemplative prayer
• 7 General conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright