Who Wants to See a Bloodbath in Church?

It was nearly 30 years ago now when, in a small (and now, sadly, closed) Anglican parish in southern Ontario, I witnessed my maternal grandmother go to war with the parish liturgical committee as it tried to impose the 1985 Book of Alternative Services of the Anglican Church of Canada. Ever since then I have, in Anglican, Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox contexts been aware of how profoundly neuralgic liturgical and musical questions are for people--and rightly so. For contrary to all the arrogant bollocks one hears from self-important "liturgists" about how they alone have the "qualifications" and "credentials" to talk about such matters, the liturgy is, perforce, the work of the people. And getting it right is not, contrary to the endless chatter of the current incumbent of the Roman bishoprick, a form of "rigidity" as I argued here, quoting one of the triumvirate (the others being MacIntyre and Newman) who made me a Catholic, Stanley Hauerwas:

One reason why we Christians argue so much about which hymn to sing, which liturgy to follow, which way to worship is that the commandments teach us to believe that bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.

Disputes about music and liturgy will surface afresh next spring with the publication of a collection edited by James Hawkey, Ben Quash, and Vernon White: God’s Song and Music’s Meanings: How Shall we Sing the Lord’s Song?
About this book the publisher tells us:

The public making of music in our society happens more often in the context of chapels, churches and cathedrals than anywhere else. The command to sing and make music to God makes music an essential part of the DNA of Christian worship. Taking seriously the practice and not just the theory of music, this ground-breaking collection of essays establishes a new standard for the interdisciplinary conversation between theology, musicology and liturgical studies. Framed by two substantive essays by leading theologians with a profound interest in music, the book’s four main sections will address questions about the history, the performance, the contexts, and the nature of music, as Christians understand it. It will show how any serious discussion of music opens onto considerations of time, tradition, ontology, anthropology, providence, and the nature of God.

We are also given the contents. While some chapters obviously pertain to a Western context, the first chapter, by the patristics scholar Carol Harrison, will obviously be of especial interest to Eastern Christians; and then the final chapter by the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart will be likewise along with the response from the Anglican scholar of Orthodoxy, Rowan Williams:

Foreword
Ben Quash
Introduction: What Does ‘Musical Meaning’ Mean? Jeremy Begbie

SECTION 1: THE MEANINGS OF MUSIC IN WESTERN HISTORY
1. Providence and Prayer: the Theology of Music in the Patristic Church
Carol Harrison
2. Music in the Great Chain of Being: Medieval Christianity
Emma Dillon
3. Hearing Revelation: Music and Theology in the Reformation
Jonathan Arnold
4. Music, Atheism and Modernity
Gareth Wilson
　
SECTION 2: MUSIC’S MEANING IN WORSHIP
4. The Worship of God and the Quest of the Spirit: ‘Contemporary’ versus ‘Traditional’ Church Music
Gordon Graham
5. The Rise of the Individual, and the Fall of Communal Participation
Anthony Ruff
　
SECTION 3: MUSICAL MEANING IN CHURCH AND WORLD
6. Musical Promiscuity: the Gods Music Serves
Lucy Winkett
7. What’s Sacred About ‘Sacred Music’?
John Butt
　
SECTION 4: GOD, THE COSMOS, AND THE MEANING OF MUSIC
8. Christ the Song of God: Is Music Absolute?
Daniel Chua
9. Sacred Music and the Holy Trinity
David Bentley Hart
CONCLUSION
Response to the Essays Rowan Williams

Early Christian Listening

We have been seeing more attention paid in the scholarly world to the role of the senses in particular, and the body in general, in Eastern and early Christianity. Moreover, we have been discovering, especially in Evagrian and other early monastic literature, certain practices of spiritual insight and guidance that would not again be "discovered" and popularized until the advent of Sigmund Freud and the birth of modern psychology. One example of this from nearly a decade ago now is the work of the Orthodox historian and theologian Susan Ashbrook Harvey in her fascinating book, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination.

Then in 2013 Carol Harrison published a book whose paperback edition is forthcoming later this spring: The Art of Listening in the Early Church (Oxford UP, 2015), 320pp. Christianity, of course, places great emphasis on message, good news, teaching, and preaching: but to whom? What of those who hear this message? How do they listen? What is involved in the process of listening?

The virtues of this book, according to the publisher, include:

• The first book to consider hearing in the early Church: Rhetoric, or the art of speaking, in the ancient world, has received a great deal of attention; the art of listening has been almost totally ignored.
• Demonstrates how the art of listening influenced early Christian practice (catechesis, preaching, prayer) as well as theological reflection.
• Uses cognitive science, contemporary philosophy, cultural anthropology, and musicology, in addition to theological reflection, to demonstrate that listening is best understood as an art rather than a matter of the rational capture of information.
• Opens up a new approach to early Christian thought and practice which gives a place to the role of the silent listener (human and divine) and examines their role in influencing what is said/written.

About this book the publisher says:

How did people think about listening in the ancient world, and what evidence do we have of it in practice? The Christian faith came to the illiterate majority in the early Church through their ears. This proved problematic: the senses and the body had long been held in suspicion as all too temporal, mutable and distracting. Carol Harrison argues that despite profound ambivalence on these matters, in practice, the senses, and in particular the sense of hearing, were ultimately regarded as necessary - indeed salvific -constraints for fallen human beings. By examining early catechesis, preaching and prayer, she demonstrates that what illiterate early Christians heard both formed their minds and souls and, above all, enabled them to become 'literate' listeners; able not only to grasp the rule of faith but also tacitly to follow the infinite variations on it which were played out in early Christian teaching, exegesis and worship. It becomes clear that listening to the faith was less a matter of rationally appropriating facts and more an art which needed to be constantly practiced: for what was heard could not be definitively fixed and pinned down, but was ultimately the Word of the unknowable, transcendent God. This word demanded of early Christian listeners a response - to attend to its echoes, recollect and represent it, stretch out towards it source, and in the process, be transformed by it.

The Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction: Voices of the Page
First Impromptu: The Other Side of Language or listening to the voice of Being
I: An Auditory Culture
1: Listening in Cultural Context
2: Rhetoric and the Art of Listening
3: Images and Echoes
II: Theme and Variations
4: Catechesis: Sounding the Theme
Second Impromptu : Playing ball: the art of reception
5: Preaching: Variations on the Theme
Third Impromptu: Singing the blues
III: From Listening to Hearing
6: The Polyphony of Prayer
7: From the bottom to the bottomless
Bibliography