THE WORDS AND THE MUSIC

I used to teach Dryden, but somehow always missed this grand and glorious composition. It should remind us that the Restoration could do lyric very well when it tried; and never better than this, which I am happy to share on the Feast of St Cecilia, martyr and patron of music.

A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687

From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony 

               This universal frame began. 

       When Nature underneath a heap 

               Of jarring atoms lay, 

       And could not heave her head, 

The tuneful voice was heard from high, 

               Arise ye more than dead. 

Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry, 

       In order to their stations leap, 

               And music's pow'r obey. 

From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony 

               This universal frame began: 

               From harmony to harmony 

Through all the compass of the notes it ran, 

       The diapason closing full in man. 

What passion cannot music raise and quell! 

                When Jubal struck the corded shell, 

         His list'ning brethren stood around 

         And wond'ring, on their faces fell 

         To worship that celestial sound: 

Less than a god they thought there could not dwell 

                Within the hollow of that shell 

                That spoke so sweetly and so well. 

What passion cannot music raise and quell! 

         The trumpet's loud clangor 

                Excites us to arms 

         With shrill notes of anger 

                        And mortal alarms. 

         The double double double beat 

                Of the thund'ring drum 

         Cries, hark the foes come; 

Charge, charge, 'tis too late to retreat. 

         The soft complaining flute 

         In dying notes discovers 

         The woes of hopeless lovers, 

Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute. 

         Sharp violins proclaim 

Their jealous pangs, and desperation, 

Fury, frantic indignation, 

Depth of pains and height of passion, 

         For the fair, disdainful dame. 

But oh! what art can teach 

         What human voice can reach 

The sacred organ's praise? 

Notes inspiring holy love, 

Notes that wing their Heav'nly ways 

         To mend the choirs above. 

Orpheus could lead the savage race; 

And trees unrooted left their place; 

                Sequacious of the lyre: 

But bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r; 

         When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n, 

An angel heard, and straight appear'd 

                Mistaking earth for Heav'n. 

As from the pow'r of sacred lays 

         The spheres began to move, 

And sung the great Creator's praise 

         To all the bless'd above; 

So when the last and dreadful hour 

   This crumbling pageant shall devour, 

The trumpet shall be heard on high, 

         The dead shall live, the living die, 

         And music shall untune the sky. 

Dryden, by Sir Godfrey Kneller

PATER, FILIUS ET SOPHIA?

Today's reading in Prions en Eglise was the following entirely beautiful passage from the Wisdom of Solomon. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have irresistibly thought, while reading it, of the Holy Spirit.

Within her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, shrewd, irresistible, beneficent, friendly to human beings, steadfast, dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all-surveying, penetrating all intelligent, pure and most subtle spirits. For Wisdom is quicker to move than any motion; she is so pure, she pervades and permeates all things. She is a breath of the power of God, pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; so nothing impure can find its way into her. For she is a reflection of the eternal light, untarnished mirror of God's active power, and image of his goodness. Although she is alone, she can do everything; herself unchanging, she renews the world, and, generation after generation, passing into holy souls, she makes them into God's friends and prophets; for God loves only those who dwell with Wisdom. She is indeed more splendid than the sun, she outshines all the constellations; compared with light, she takes first place, for light must yield to night, but against Wisdom evil cannot prevail. Strongly she reaches from one end of the world to the other and she governs the whole world for its good. 

(Wisdom 7:22-8:1)

ALL VOLTAIRE"S FAULT? (OR, COME BACK, WILL BLAKE)

(A friend reminded me of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Blake: this conversation is hardly new. And in France, “C’est la faute à Voltaire” is an old expression, probably as old as the Revolution.)

The award-winning French daily La Croix, reporting on the current meeting at Lourdes of the French Catholic Church’s bishops, mentioned how different the situation now is from that of 50-100 years ago. Then, the problem was anticlericalism: the Church was seen by many as the Enemy, to be reviled, resisted and refused. Now, on the other hand, the problem is indifference.

After a month’s travelling in the United States and Canada, and now returned to la République française, I find myself agreeing ruefully with this statement. Quite apart from political situations and the public personæ driving them – a play with strong characters, a chaotic plot and no visible playwright – I see everywhere human situations of need, urgency, grief, pain and sorrow that cry out for faith where no faith is.

Let me be clear. I do not mean that faith is, in the simple and especially in the simplistic sense, the solution. Where grief strikes or pain, faith will not make them go away. But faith will let such moments, such events, be lived in another fashion, another context, another dimension. Faith lets them be lived in a context of prayer – perhaps even of rebellious and angry prayer, but prayer: which means the context of a relation. In a number of languages there exists a proverb like “A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved”; and it is true that sharing a grief with a true friend lightens the burden. Hence, might sharing it with the loving Father of All not lighten it dramatically?

And yet when I look around me I find that increasingly (and more perhaps in France than in America), having faith is looked upon benignly as an idiosyncrasy, a hobby or what the French call une passion: X does old cars, Y collects stamps, Z does religion. Doubtless such pursuits give X,Y, and Z profound satisfaction, but they are best kept to oneself and not shared with (“forced on”) others. Faith is emphatically not seen as something one needs, still less something the world needs. One gets along perfectly well without it, and looking at Islam gives one less than perfect sympathy for those who live by it, let alone a desire to do so. At best, one is sometimes told, “Yes, well, you have faith: I don’t. That’s just the way it is; sometimes I wish I had it, but I just don’t.” End of subject. Faith, in other words, is something you have or you don’t, like blue eyes: the condition, whether of having or lacking, is definitive and beyond one’s control. And (it is intimated) much the best that way. 

What is one to answer to this? The Church tells us, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly, that we must be disciples and missionaries; but it carefully stops there. And all of us know that in the fairly sophisticated and utterly indifferent world in which we live, move, and have our being, trumpeting the Good News to one’s neighbours will be neither welcome nor efficacious.

There is another way, also favoured by the Church. Be merciful, it says; tirelessly do good to and for others; and even without your mentioning your faith, people will start asking themselves and others what on earth makes you tick? And that can be an opening into the subject.  Unfortunately, I have never seen this happen in real life: the indifferent are not indifferent to good works, but do not question their fons et origo. “She is a truly good woman,” they will say; but they don’t ask what makes her so.

On the other side of the picture you have those who do have faith but give it a bad name. These are to be found in many denominations, from Pentecostal to Roman Catholic. They are absolutely sure of their dogma, which they use as a sledge-hammer to beat their opponents with. They relish combat because it is, as they see it, for Christ. In analogy with “Islamists” I call them Christianists. They do untold harm. They insult and injure for Christ; they threaten and malign for Christ; and sometimes they kill for Christ and gleefully urge their government to do so. They create scornful atheists wherever they go.

So those of us who have faith -- though never enough: “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief” – faith riddled with doubt, faith skating on uncertainty – walk very quietly on the whole, between the Christianist cannon on the one hand and the Indifferent desert on the other, hoping against hope that somehow, sometime, God will do something --  appear on CNN, call Time, throw Kremlin, Tienanmen and White House into the ocean and declare Playtime Over. When disaster happens – Irma, Maria, terrorist attacks, high-rise fires – we react with surprising and touching kindness and even, sometimes,  efficiency; but overall we don’t give the impression of believing that faith and prayer are either essential or a Good Thing in this world.

Perhaps we need to feel more confident. Perhaps we need to stop confusing attitudes to religion with attitudes to sex. Perhaps we need to speak up more. Not to yank others by the shirtfront and yell at them, but to tell the world that we are eyewitnesses – not to that Event two millennia ago, but to the mercies, the spiritual gifts, the joy even in grief, that we personally have received. Eyewitnesses to the good that intelligent charity, discerningly directed love, does. Eyewitnesses to the evil that humiliation brings, whether humiliation of persons or of countries.

After all, those of us old enough to remember the falling of the Berlin Wall know that we had a chance to turn with discernment and charity to Russia and to one Vladimir Putin, and we threw it away. Our great-grandparents had a chance to turn with discernment and charity to a defeated Germany in 1918 and instead gave it the Treaty of Versailles. Even today, we have the chance to approach with discernment, charity and brotherhood the millions of young Iranians who look to us and their sometimes approachable government; we perhaps have a tiny chance left to approach that strange young man in Pyongyang to deal with him without naiveté but without humiliation.

And always, always, the basic force that moves our world – our micro-world and our macro-world – is prayer. With prayer, anything is possible. Without it, nothing profound or lasting is. Shit still happens; God does not micromanage; but we need not be helpless in the face of it.

A PROSE LYRIC

Today is the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity by the old and proper Anglican reckoning. It is especial only to those who still, after 468 years, love Thomas Cranmer, not particularly for his personality nor even for his doctrine, but for his unusual literary genius – a talent that showed itself nowhere in his ordinary prose but only in his translations of Latin liturgical texts. These, as a hundred generations knew by birthright but new generations are only slowly rediscovering, are little short of miraculous; and today’s Collect is perhaps the most perfect of them all.

Here is the original version, from the 8^th-century Gelasian Sacramentary:

Largire, quaesumus Domine, fidelibus tuis indulgentiam placátus, et pácem: ut pariter ab omnibus mundentur offensis, et secura tibi ménte desérviant.
Per Dominum... 

What Cranmer found there was a text moving in its meaning: it asks God to give to his faithful the gifts of forgiveness and peace, so that they may equally be shriven of all their offences and serve him in security of spirit. Moreover, the Latin has some elegance in its word-order, and the endings of the two clauses are so ordered that they show the characteristic rhythmic end-patterns known as cursus, in this case a cursus planus (/xx/x) and a cursus velox (/xx/xx) respectively.

The challenge for the translator lay in the form’s compact and condensed beauty. How to render this in English? Cranmer had an ear for the cursus, which has distant relatives in native English prose rhythms, and the collect’s first one suggested to him the use of the very English feature of alliteration. Moreover, he realised that the Latin was so constructed that each of the second clause’s two halves expanded on a term of the first clause, the first on indulgentiam and the second on pacem: this he could also do in his translation. We do not know how many attempts he made, but when he had finished the Collect for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity looked like this:

Grant, we beseech thee, merciful Lord, to thy faithful people pardon and peace: that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

However, the beauty of the form and the ordering of the content is better seen if we print it like this:

Grant, we beseech thee,

merciful Lord,

to thy faithful people

pardon and peace:

that they may be cleansed from all their sins

and serve thee with a quiet mind.

Note how Cranmer begins with a cursus planus, but placed at the beginning of sentence, which Latin never did; and he continues with three other two-stress phrases, the second and fourth ending on a stressed syllable, to give an almost metric stanza (or two Anglo-Saxon half-lines). Then he broadens the pattern to end with two three-stress lines, which expand on “pardon” and “peace” respectively.

It is a jewel of a Collect, as exquisitely patterned as an Elizabethan sonnet. For those not used to examining Cranmer’s Collects in this way, it provides a splendid introduction: almost all of these prayers in the Book of Common Prayer have remarkable qualities of content or form, or both.