Jonathan Arnold, Music and Faith: conversations in a post-secular age, The Boydell Press, 2019 £30
This book offers a reflection on the state of sacred music in secular Western Europe, a mosaic of opinion constructed from conversation with a variety of writers, artists, scientists, historians, atheists, church laity and clergy. The term “post-secular” emerges as a description of the relationship between faith, religion, spirituality, agnosticism and atheism in the West today. Among his interlocutors, we hear speakers who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” and who find that, in our post-secular climate, music restores something that has been lost. Science and mathematics are not opposed to any search for the unknowable, for they can promote an exploration of the world where truth and beauty can be found in the process of encounter, experience and relationship. Composer, performer and listener can resonate with a deep sense of physical coherence able to lift us out of the material plain to spiritual experience. Music, particularly communal music, can help restore “a sense of awe, wonder and mystery” (p42).
Arnold is Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College Oxford. Hehas a professional background as a choral singer in both liturgical and non-liturgical settings. In consort with his interlocutors he traces a line of continuity between the late medieval experience of religion, through the logocentrism of the Reformation and the modern world, to a twenty-first century Western culture of decline in biblical literacy and an incline in the search for non-religious spirituality. He explores the relational and communal process of experiencing faith through music, a process not necessarily closely akin to the affirmation of propositional belief.
Arnold begins with the premiss that faith is love that of its nature creates poetry and music, joy and beauty. Cathedrals and chapels are not medieval monuments but living buildings where we meet others and find God. He provides persuasiveevidence that great music, Gregorian chant, Bach, Mozart, isnot a thing of the past, but alive in the vitality of liturgy and many different expressions of faith. For Arnold Christianity is better sung than said: music often penetrates further than language into what is unsayable about God. What he calls “explicit theology” (creeds, biblical teaching, articles of religion, doctrine) is enlivened by music, not merely as an accompaniment to faith, but as an illuminator of it. “The arts, and music in particular, offer one important way into finding a transcendent path which can take our experience of the world and help us to perceive the reality and mystical truth of something greater beyond ourselves” (p27). Music, unconstrained by ideology, reason or cognitive assent, can, paradoxically, take us deeper into an understanding of scripture, doctrine and tradition.
Arnold defines music as “the art and science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds or tones in varying melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre, especially so as to form structurally complete and emotionally expressive compositions” (p35). While belief in the propositional elements of religion is no longer the norm for most people in Western society, many of them still declare some faith in God or a higher power. Music is essentially relational, not isolating, and so he prefers the word trust to belief when exploring the encounter between music, poetry and religious assent. Imagination, as Wordsworth proposed, is an intelligence which supplies power of insight where language falls short. “My working definition of faith,” Arnold writes, “is…rooted in religious practice, ritual, community…with an emphasis on orthopraxy as well as orthodoxy” (p40). He links musical experience with ways of doing pastoral theology, concerned, among other things, with rescuing modern society from the isolation of individualism and consumerism and the widening gap between rich and poor.
The book’s method includes extended interview passages and notes from the twelve participants who (together with a wide range of scholarly reading listed in an extensive bibliography) are the research base for its assertions, including a bishop, apoet and professors from humanities, science and social science disciplines. His connecting and interpreting the opinions of his interlocutors (who by design do not always agree with one another) requires Arnold, in addition to including his own opinions and insights, to take on the role of managing editor and referee. This results in quite a lot of repetition and makes more demands on the reader than would have been if he had presented his case in the more conventional form of digested research and quotation. Nevertheless, Arnold has bravely tackled a complex subject of great cultural importance, and the read is worth the effort. Aptly, the poet Seamus Heaney has the last word:
Upend the rainstick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for…
Reading Hour 