Reformation Sunday

Today Lutherans (and some reluctant Anglicans) observe Reformation Day. (Listen to Bach's Cantata #80, or Mendelssohn's Fifth Symphony. You might also consider getting out your copy of Luther's Small Catechism.) I write "observe", rather than "celebrate", because, ecumenically speaking, I don't suppose schism is to be lauded. Stanley Hauerwas (a Protestant who, besides being a theologian you actually might've heard of, has taught at both Augustana and Notre Dame) expresses this ambivalence pretty well:

Reformation Sunday does not name a happy event for the Church Catholic; on the contrary, it names failure. Of course, the church rightly names failure, or at least horror, as part of our church year. We do, after all, go through crucifixion as part of Holy Week. Certainly if the Reformation is to be narrated rightly, it is to be narrated as part of those dark days.

Recently I've been thinking about that Ratzinger quotation I mentioned in my 4 October entry, the one about the only effective apologia for Christianity being its art and its saints. We've already discussed saints to some degree; now for art. I daresay Protestantism has held its own pretty well on the aesthetic front: George Herbert, John Donne, Cranmer's tremendous prose, Buxtehude, Handel, and Bach – Bach, perhaps the pinnacle of Western music, who was a devout Lutheran. Is it terribly shallow of me to admit that I am reluctant to convert to Roman Catholicism — or to Eastern Orthodoxy, for that matter — due in no small part to aesthetic reasons? Why, if art is one of the great justifications for Christianity, should I renounce the treasures of my Protestant musical and linguistic heritage in exchange for the Gather hymnal and the New American Bible? Gerard Manley Hopkins admitted frankly that "bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of [Roman] Catholicism", and he lived long before the Novus Ordo and guitar Masses.

Rainer Maria Rilke: Herbst

Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.

Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

---
You may refer here for various translations, if you must. 'Twould be better to learn German, probably.
I noticed that it was almost a year ago today that I posted Mr Berry's "A Gracious Sabbath", which accords nicely with this poem.

Sufjan in Chicago

Yesterday I attended Sufjan Stevens's concert at the Chicago Theatre. It was enjoyable, if not profound. My opinion of his latest album, The Age of Adz (from which most of the songs last night were taken), remains much the same as what I thought of his last EP: he can't go on like this forever. Mr Stevens has a gift for catchy musical motives; in past albums (esp. Illinois and Michigan) he used this to create satisfying contrapuntal layers. Now that he's working so overwhelmingly with electronics, there's a certain finesse that's lost. His lyrics, with some exceptions, are (intentionally?) enigmatic; while this was tolerable when the music was prettier, it's more difficult to maintain an emotional connection to a song when neither the music nor the words are particularly comprehensible. Perhaps Mr Stevens would prefer not to be understood.

The most impressive part of last night's concert was "Impossible Soul", a veritable suite with epic ambitions (or, if you prefer, delusions of grandeur).

Listen: Sufjan Stevens, "Impossible Soul"

Sufjan Stevens at the Chicago Theatre
Set List:
"Seven Swans" (from Seven Swans)
"Too Much" (The Age of Adz)
"Age of Adz" (ibid.)
"Heirloom" (All Delighted People)
"I Walked" (The Age of Adz)
"Now That I'm Older" (ibid.)
"Vesuvius" (ibid.)
"Futile Devices" (ibid.)
"Get Real Get Right" (ibid.)
"The Owl and the Tanager" (All Delighted People)
"Impossible Soul" (The Age of Adz)
"Chicago" (Illinois)
Encores:
"Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois" (Illinois)
"Decatur, or, Round of Applause for Your Stepmother!" (ibid.)
"Casimir Pulaski Day" (ibid.)
"John Wayne Gacy, Jr." (ibid.)

Nico Muhly

My most recent music discovery: Nico Muhly, whose music sounds like a combination of some of the more interesting elements in Byrd, Tavener, and John Adams. I'll refer you to a little feature about him at NPR Music, where you may find a recording of his Senex Puerum Portabat — originally an antiphon for Candlemas, but reënvisioned for Christmas with the addition of the Hodie Christus natus est text and some festive trombones. Also interesting is the Bright Mass with Canons. Elsewhere, Muhly makes a good case for Renaissance polyphony:

In Romantic music, every note — every detail of orchestration — is illustrative of the composer's emotional journey; in the audience, we're obliged to follow the itinerary outlined for us. At its best, this feels like an adventure. At its worst, it's like being stuck in conversation with a man muttering professorially into a pint of beer. I would get frustrated playing Beethoven sonatas, thinking: "Yes, I agree that it is raining very hard, and we were talking about this at great length before that sweet part when you wanted to talk about your girlfriend and you cried a little bit, but why can't you just hide under that tarpaulin there instead of staying out in the cold and gnashing your teeth?"

By contrast, Byrd, Gibbons, Weelkes and Tye were like the dinner guests on whom you had crushes as a child, not because of any particular story they told, but because of the way they told those stories — the turns of phrase, the little obsessive details, the localised, rather than structural repetitions. The content of the stories could be in another language, but the little gestures — the musical equivalent of subtly tapping the table twice to reinforce a conclusion, smoothing out the tablecloth before the punchline of a joke, a well-timed sip of wine with eyebrows cocked - were the stars of the show, they were like the things you remember when people you love have changed, or moved away, or died.

A Pronouncement, ex Cathedra

It is difficult, what with today's postmodern world and such, to make definite announcements regarding just about anything. But I aver, with every ounce of conviction that I have, that the best drink that there is to be gotten anywhere is the simple Gin & Tonic. Why, whenever I drink it, I feel like I've donned my pith helmet and am relaxing in a cavernous lodge somewhere in Kenya (which I am inclined to pronounce "keen-ya", when I drink Gin & Tonics) or the Punjab or some other barbarous place where I've been sent by Her Majesty the Queen to establish some outpost of civilization (which is to say, British civilization, which is to say, British colonization). The best gins, I have found, are probably Bombay Sapphire or Hendrick's, though I will settle for Tanqueray in a pinch.

The Adoration of the Magi

We are defined by, more than anything else, our desires: both the fulfilled ones and the thwarted ones, I think. Once a man has it in his head that he wants something, this desire begins to shape him. Ambition, or lust, or greed, eventually become engraved on a man's face, as do the more admirable, less common, desires. One need only to consider the sorts of things people want nowadays to begin to understand why the world is an imperfect place (and getting worse, one will note).

This is all just a roundabout way of coming to the point I was going to make when I started writing. When I was in Prague, I visited — as all tourists to that city must — Prague Castle. The most impressive part of that very large complex is probably St. Vitus's Cathedral, which is as fine an example of Gothic architecture as you'll find anywhere in Mitteleuropa. My favorite memory of the castle, however, comes from the considerably smaller Basilica of St. George, which is basically Romanesque (albeit with some Gothic and, regrettably, Baroque elements. I cannot understand why anyone would deface the simple purity of a Romanesque interior with the gaudy showiness of a Baroque façade). In one of the side aisles (to the south of the nave, if my memory serves), there is a medieval carved (wooden?) relief depicting the adoration of the Magi: I say without hesitation that this was my favorite work of art that I saw in Prague. I did not take a picture of it — I find tourists taking pictures in church to be irritating enough that I did not dare do so myself — but here is the best picture of it that I could find on the internet:


Of the six figures, three are unexceptional: the two wise-men in the background, and St. Joseph (who always seems to get a rather raw deal in such depictions. Here he looks rather disinterested. It's not his son, anyway, after all). But the three central figures are remarkable. The Theotokos sits with the Christ-child on her lap, looking rather guarded: who is this foreigner come to gawk at her son? Most striking is the third wise-man, who has taken off his crown. (Why are the Magi supposed to've been kings? Oh well; no matter.) His expression — which you can't see so well in this particular photograph — is of undisguised wonder: here, here, offering his hands in a childlike gesture of blessing, is the desire of the man's heart. The carving has captured a moment of transcendence: the union of the soul with the soul's creator. What else is there to say about the Christian life, save that we ought to seek Christ with such fervor? Would that all sacred art served as such good catechesis...

St. Francis

Today is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. By a happy coïncidence, it also happened that today there was a lecture given here at Notre Dame on G.K. Chesterton, which I attended. Here's a bit of what Chesterton has to say about Francis:

To most people ... there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of Saint Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger: he was, perhaps, the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded his whole polity on the negation of what we think the most imperious necessities; in his three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, he denied to himself and those he loved most, property, love, and liberty. Why was it that the most large-hearted and poetic spirits in that age found their most congenial atmosphere in these awful renunciations? Why did he who loved where all men were blind, seek to blind himself where all men loved? Why was he a monk and not a troubadour? These questions are far too large to be answered fully here, but in any life of Francis they ought at least to have been asked; we have a suspicion that if they were answered we should suddenly find that much of the enigma of this sullen time of ours was answered also.

I'll refer you also to Chesterton's biography of St. Francis.

The current Pope, when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, noted that "[t]he only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb." St. Francis is one of those saints who represent Christianity rather well, if I do say so myself. Incidentally, I don't doubt that the Christian religion is still producing saints, though few of them have such good P.R. as Mother Teresa. The real question is whether there is any more Christian art being produced nowadays. (Let's save that topic for another day, shall we?)