Thoughts on
Art Religion by way of a reflection on Article 26 of the 39 Articles, regarding
priestly moral character and the administration of a sacrament
https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/109014/Thirty-Nine-Articles-of-Religion.pdf
...
26. Of the Unworthiness
of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacraments. Although in
the visible Church the evil be ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the
evil have chief authority in the Ministration of the Word and Sacraments, yet
forasmuch as they do not the same in their own name, but in Christ's, and do
minister by his commission and authority, we may use their Ministry, both in
hearing the Word of God, and in receiving the Sacraments. Neither is the effect
of Christ's ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor the grace of God's
gifts diminished from such as by faith, and rightly, do receive the Sacraments
ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ's institution and
promise, although they be ministered by evil men. Nevertheless, it appertaineth
to the discipline of the Church, that inquiry be made of evil Ministers, and
that they be accused by those that have knowledge of their offences; and
finally, being found guilty, by just judgment be deposed.
https://northamanglican.com/ministerial-character-intention-and-the-sacraments-commentary-on-browne-article-xxvi/
Ministerial Character,
Intention, and the Sacraments [Commentary on Browne: Article XXVI]
James Clark
November 18, 2024
It is generally agreed
among commentators that Anabaptists are the primary target of Article
XXVI: “Whatever may have been the popular feeling on this subject among the
advocates of reformation in general, there is no doubt that the Anabaptists (in
conformity with their general principle, that the whole Church should be pure
and sincere) held the impropriety of receiving Sacraments from ungodly
ministers,”[1] which
notion the Article rejects. The issue did not originate with them, however, but
goes back to the controversy in the early church over whether baptisms
performed by heretics are valid. Whereas “Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage…and the
African bishops who were with him, denied the validity of baptism by heretics
and schismatics…. Stephen, Bishop of Rome, took the directly opposite view,
admitting all baptism, whether by schismatics or heretics, so it was with water
in the name of the Trinity; and such has been the rule of the Latin Church ever
since.” This principle remains a source of comfort even now, for churches today
are no less plagued by heretical ministers than they were in the first
centuries of Christianity. Yet because the power of the sacraments does not
depend on the personal character or doctrinal soundness of those who administer
them, the laity do not have to fear on the minister’s account that the washing
away of their sins in baptism was but an external sprinkling of water, or that
the Body and Blood of Christ are but mere bread and wine.
…
One of the things I have said in the past is that defenders
of Art Religion can come across as people who are not very conversant in topics
that show up in the the observance of religion.
It’s a bit glib to put it this way but partisans of Eurocentric Art
Religion, whether in its highbrow or lowbrow formulations, tend to not think
much about sacraments, and why would they?
They don’t believe in religion … but … the liberal arts make you better
people than people who don’t imbibe from the Great Well of Well-Being that is
Art for the sake of Art.
Gordon Graham has written about how art religions can come
in the form of highbrow asceticism and in lowerbrow forms. Graham has contended that Art is never going
to replace Religion because all the partisans of art religion are artists who
know they are artists and are making things for artists and art consumers. In other words, Art is not a viable civic
religious cult. Since the art for art’s
sake people dismiss any art that has a social utility of any kind as “propaganda”
Art Religion will crash and burn on the island of autonomy. This was what Theodor Adorno said was the
problem with the liberation of art from theology all the way back in the 1960s
in Aesthetic Theory:
Aesthetic Theory
Theodore Adorno
Copyright (c) 1997 by the Regents
of the University of Minnesota
Continuum
ISBN 0-8264-6757-1
page 1
It is self-evident that nothing
concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to
the world, not even its right to exist. ...
page 2
...
As a result of its inevitable
withdrawal from theology, from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation,
a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned
to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that—shorn of any hope of
a world beyond—strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art
wants to free itself. ...
If an artwork should attain (or be granted) the lofty
status of “autonomy” for the partisans of art for the sake of art then the
artwork has been (and has to be) divested of any social utility.
And what is that if not the consecration of chosen elements
for a sacrament? Adorno wrote plenty of
tortured and opaque prose but this is an element of Art Religion lurking in his
observation that:
Page 271
… The aesthetic principle of form is in itself, through the
synthesis of what is formed, the positing of meaning even when meaning is
substantively rejected. To this extent, whatever it wills or states, art
remains theology; its claim to truth and its affinity to untruth are one and
the same. This emerged specifically in Jugendstil. The situation
culminates in the question of whether, after the fall of theology and in its
total absence, art is still possible. But if, as in Hegel—who was the first to
express historicophilosophical doubts as to this possibility—this necessity
subsists, art retains an oracular quality; it is ambiguous whether the
possibility of art is a genuine witness to what endures of theology or if it is
the reflection of an enduring spell.
The aesthetic principle in Art Religion is the rite of
designating something as adhering to the aesthetic principle (whatever that is)
in such a way that the bread and wine are no longer just bread and wine. If something has not been designated as “art”
it is not imputed with the capacity to sanctify the recipient of the Art
Religion sacrament to those who are willing and able to receive it with the
proper Intention.
Speaking of which, let’s get back to James Clark’s series
on Browne on the Thirty-Nine Articles:
Another topic commonly
raised in connection with this Article is the Church of Rome’s so-called
doctrine of Intention, which Browne characterizes as the belief that “no
Sacrament is valid, unless the priest intends that it should be so.” More
fully, “If…in outwardly ministering a Sacrament, [the minister] does not intend
to confer the benefits of the Sacrament, they will not be conferred.” Browne
does not think it “probable”[2] that
the framers of the Article had this doctrine in view, but he believes the
Article “virtually and in effect meets it.” The consequences of the doctrine,
as Browne expounds them, are dire: “If no Sacrament is valid, unless the priest
intends that it should be so; then we know not whether our children be
baptized, our wives married, our communions received, or our bishops
consecrated.”[3] Implicit
in this critique is an understanding of the intention in question as being
mental or internal. However, it is disputed within the Church of Rome whether
the intention said to be required of the minister is indeed internal, or merely
external:
Generally speaking,
the principle of the Roman Church is that this Intention is necessary. Thus,
Aquinas says that if a man does not intend to minister the Sacrament and only
does it in mockery the validity is at an end. The Council of Trent anathematises
those who say that the intention of the minister to do what the Church does is
not required. Subsequently a subtle distinction arose between internal and
external Intention. The external Intention is the intention of the priest to
administer the Sacrament in the customary form; the internal Intention is the
intention to administer it in the sense of the Church. The only vital
difference is as to the internal intention, and on this there is a difference
in the Roman Church itself. The Ultramontane party has maintained the necessity
of the internal intention, while the Gallican school have denied this.[4]
…
If the internal intention to minister the sacrament is faulty
or absent but the external intention to minister the sacrament is effected then
we’ve got a sacrament. There are those
who are set on a version of Art Religion in which the internal intent is so
paramount nothing else matters. If the
Artist intends to make Art that is all that matters and whether that manifests
as an external expression of some kind that “connects” with an audience who is
not emotionally touched by the resultant music, well, so much the worse for
those people in the audience who have some notion about music that its purpose
is to “make me feel something”. Theodor
Adorno poured scorn on those kinds of listeners who seek out music to function
as some kind of mood-altering opiate in his Introduction to the
Sociology of Music. The kinds of people who listened to music to feel
something were not listening for the unfolding of musical structures, they were
also usually the kinds of women or Slavs who sought out Tchaikovsky and other
composers who dispensed intense emotions like melancholy and “joy” like candy
from a dispenser. No, real and serious art was not going to do the listening
for the listener.
On the other hand, by the 1950s Adorno was damning both
Stockhausen and Cage at a stroke in “The Aging of
the New Music” because he regarded the likes of Pierre Boulez and John Cage
as having embraced systems of composition that relieved composers of ever being
decision-making subjects. Whether
through Boulez and his integral serialism or Cage and his aleatoric music both
men embraced approaches to music where there was no personal agency exercised, in
Adorno’s damning appraisal. There were
composers Adorno didn’t rip into like Edgar Varese and Gyorgy Ligeti (whom he
said were still using their actual ears to guide them in their composing and
making actual artistic decisions) but his vitriol for the post-Webern approach
to integral serialism was unstinting. So
the lofty intent to make Art wasn’t sufficient even for Adorno, there had to be
a finished result he could still regard as music and he lamented bitterly that
the post-Webern serialists seemed to believe that by merely arranging the
paints on the palette they had already made actual paintings, but it was not
so!
But what about the external intention to make Art? Maybe that is to express something.
The trouble, in a post-Adorno trans-Atlantic academic world, is that Adorno
claimed tonality was “used up” and that no one could “legitimately” use tonal
materials without being some kind of fraud or sentimental twerp. Maybe Bartok could still use tonal materials
because he wasn’t a sell-out but nobody in Western Europe could wield the tonal
materials of even a Debussy or Wagner with any legitimacy. There was still what
Richard Taruskin described as the “rush
to the patent office” ethos and praxis of originality. Mere expression was
no good. When George Rochberg turned
away from serialism back to Mahler and late Beethoven he was scorned as a
sell-out. Who could “legitimately”
attempt to have external expression as a goal in music? This is where the second half of
intentionality and the ministration of the Art Religion sacrament of Music
stays a hot topic. Is originality
important? John Borstlap has posed this
question very directly with respect to his own music over at The
Subterranean Review this December 22, 2024.
I was tidying-up
some old papers, and came across a couple of assessments that had been
submitted during the court case I had initiated in 2012 against the Netherlands
national funding foundation which had consistently refused to fund commissions
I got from music life, on the grounds that my music lacked all forms of
originality and was mere pastiche and thus, irrelevant and thus, should not be
paid for, even if orchestras or ensembles had chosen to commission me.
Assessments of the music at the foundation were done by comitees of experts,
drawn from the circles of the new music network: composers and performers
active in the ensemble circuit of the country, who themselves were clients of
the foundation (grants, commission fees) and thus knew exactly into which
direction state subsidies for new music had to go.
…
Western serious concert
music up till 20C modernism, has two layers of meaning: the musical language
(as described by Scruton), and the layer of expression: that which is being
conveyed in terms of musical meaning. This concept has been pushed to the margins
or even completely out of sight when modernism in the last century became some
kind of 'standard view' of new music: the language as such is the only thing
that counts because there is nothing else. And in a culturally-provincial
country like the Netherlands, deviations from what is considered by circles of
ignorant people as 'the norm', are not tolerated. So, of course since 2012 I
have focussed on the world outside the country where I have no place. Therefore
I am very grateful to Jaap van Zweden who commissioned and premiered my music
with his orchestras in Dallas and Hong Kong and thereby proved, by its audience
success and enthusiastic press, how miserable the 'new music establishment' in
the Netherlands was, and still is, thinking of the fragments I occasionally
hear of what is currently being produced.
This would be the point where it’s possible to be sympathetic
to a composer who was denied payment by bureaucrats and yet also consider that
many a “timeless” work of choral music written by practicing Christians in the
18th century was written as liturgical music and not as Art. Johann
Sebastian Bach’s Passions and cantatas were liturgical music performed in
churches. Joseph (or Michael) Haydn’s
masses were liturgical music. When
Schutz set every last verse of Psalm 119 to music for double choir it was as
liturgical music and not as Art. Sweelinck
made settings of texts from every Psalm in the Psalter drawing on melodies from
the Genevan Psalter and that was liturgical music with a clear social function
and it is only retroactively that Romantic era writers might designate it as
Art.
The thing that contemporary scholars debate or even openly
resent is that dead white guys were posthumously credited as having made Art
who, in their actual lifetimes might have not just denied the credit but
objected to it. The elephant in the room
might be that for Christians their objection would have been an actually
religious objection. The arts may
beautifully adorn the sacraments but the arts are not themselves sacraments.
The hat trick of Art Religion has been to transubstantiate debates and
discussions of sacraments from what people used to call Christendom into terms
that have been putatively secularized.
Philip Ewell isn’t a crank or a fake or a fraud for picking up on the
highly parasitic nature of this Eurocentric Art Religion discourse and
explicitly rejecting the terms of presentation.
As a Christian I differ with Ewell the atheist on a few metaphysical
points but because I come at religious life as a low-church Calvinist Anglican
with Presbyterian history and a real sympathy for Puritans as well as Swiss and
Dutch Reformed theologians I am probably about as skeptical of Germanophile Art
Religion mysticism as Philip Ewell is for ostensibly “opposite” reasons.
I have made my thoughts on the problems of Art Religion
plain enough over the years and I have even written a piece called “John
Borstlap and the theodicies of art religion”. What makes art religion such
a bad faith enterprise is its partisans take up every theodicy for Art that
they often implicitly or even explicitly reject for Religion but what’s bad for
the goose of Christendom in the “West” is no better for the gander of an Art
Religion that is, I say, parasitically dependent upon the Christendom it was
alleged to replace and surpass. Yet here
we are in 2024 and Norman Lebrecht could, in all earnestness, write about the
death of Dmitri Shostakovich as the day the symphony died. Forgive us guitarists who love the music of
Shostakovich but have never seen the “death of the symphony” as any kind of
death of classical music. Palestrina
masses and Byrd’s Gradualia are still around to be heard and admired, after all. Anyone who has read about William
Byrd knows he was obstinately set on not becoming the kind of Anglican who
turned away from Catholic doctrine. He was so good at what he did he was
granted forms of clemency others were not, a recusant Catholic who was not
arrested or jailed for saying and doing the kinds of things other men were
jailed for. If Byrd were alive today he
would not, likely, be the kind of man who would think of his music as a
sacrament when he could go attend mass.
That the questions about the proper and legitimate
ministrations of sacraments in trans-Atlantic academic contexts may be debates
that have “migrated’ from what were originally religious debates is part of the
things music scholarship can address. I
think Ewell’s points are tendentious in some ways and understandable in
others. If he were more conversant in
the kinds of literally religious debates that have happened about liturgy and
sacrament he might be more able to articulate why he believes a sacramental
view of Beethoven’s Ninth is not good for people nor good for Beethoven’s
Ninth. I am partial to the Dutch Reformed
Gerardus van der Leeuw’s complaint that the choral finale of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony is a “crude deistic frenzy”. I
actually hate a lot of Beethoven’s choral music whereas I think Haydn and
Mozart are fine (I even love Haydn’s music, for that matter).
And here may be the thing about Religion that makes it
particularly relevant to Art. In
Religion innovation for its own sake has no intrinsic value and you’re not
supposed to come up with the newest way to “express” liturgy. There are reasons a bunch of Catholics
despise what they regard as the dubious innovations of Vatican II. There are reasons people want the oldest and
most venerable forms of ministering sacraments.
There are Anglicans who want the older or oldest version of the Book of
Common Prayer because it is ancient and because they consider it to be not “original”
in the sense of some rush to the patent office.
It is also the case that there are people who want liturgy and sacrament
that expresses the truths of the true faith and are not looking for someone to
work “personal expression” into things. Palestrina may have expressed himself
as a “person” in his liturgical music but that was a fringe benefit to writing
music as a Catholic. Art Religion, seen in these kinds of terms, has put the
cart before the horse and by the 21st century has its partisans
wondering why we can’t get back to the Old Time Art Religion of “expression”
when that kind of “expression” was an innovation of Romantics whose art
mysticism tried to pick up what was allegedly spent or opaque in Christendom.
But who was one of the most far-out avant gardists of the
mid-20th century? Olivier
Messiaen, that’s who. O sacrum convivium
is weird but in a gorgeous way. It was the kind of sincere and sugary religious
piety that Dmitri Shostakovich found insufferable and infuriating but he was,
after all, a Soviet composer.
I have been a fan of Richard Taruskin for years now and
even when I sharply disagree with things he’s written I have found him a helpful
interlocutor. His arguments against Art Religion are trenchant and I consider
one of his lasting achievements as a historian and a scholar is to have
expressed a
love of classical music while simultaneously arguing passionately against
viewing music in sacramental terms. It may be one of the paradoxes of this
world we live in that a Christian who has respect for Puritans and Zwingli and
Calvin could agree with a secular Jew who was a big fan of Adlai
Stevenson. Well, hey, I have come around
to consider myself a Mark Hatfield Republican and Richard Taruskin was
certainly old enough to have known who the Oregon Senator was. There was a time
in the early 1980s where two of the most famous evangelical Christians holding
political office in the United States were President Jimmy Carter and Oregon
Senator Mark Hatfield. The Religious
Right was taking shape but it had not yet risen to prominence in the era of
Nixon and Carter. That would come later. During those years the trendy thing in
academic musicology was being certain that tonality was still “used up” and
that the intentions of composers to make serious music that didn’t pander to
the desire of audiences to be made to “feel” was a thing. Ex opere
operato indeed!
Richard Taruskin’s writing against what he called the
poietic fallacy can’t even be the least bit mysterious if we approach his
point from the perspective of someone who has any inkling of what a sacrament
is. Schoenberg intended his music to be
Art and therefore for partisans of Art Religion in its highest of highbrow
forms that Intention would be sufficient to make the artwork a proper sacrament
provided the artwork was produced in the appropriate way.
One of the simplest problems with any claim that if an
artist intends to create Art that this is sufficient to make the thing so is
the matter of craft. Roger Scruton
claimed for years that John Cage was a charlatan. Now I am not really a fan of Cage overall but
I don’t regard him as a charlatan. What I do think can be said about Cage was
he took an approach to making music that highlighted the problem of the poietic
fallacy, as Taruskin discussed it, and which highlights the core problem with
Romantic conceptions of the Artists making Art, that if intention is all that
matters everyone is the greatest Artist on earth.
Christopher Hitchens is said to have quipped that just
about everyone has a book in him which is usually where that book should stay
and the same could be said about other arts.
Everyone can have an idea for a
story but the skill is in the execution.
Good or bad execution has been the historically observable difference
between whether or not something has been called Art. But …
In an era in which scholars have questioned the criteria by
which Beethoven symphonies were declared sacred and not albums by James Brown
it can be easy to overlook that in the debates about whether the elements have
been properly set aside and rendered suitably sacramental that the process of
officiating the sacrament itself can be more or less the same in the Art
Religion of Michael Jackson sons as Beethoven symphonies. In this respect
poptimists and rockists are debating not about their Art Religion sacrament
being a sacrament or not but about what elements are acceptable for
presentation via rite as fit to be sacramental elements. Is this wine and that bread acceptable? Is this song or that piece acceptable? Does that album not count?
My own stance is that however much the arts may adorn
sacraments the arts are not sacraments. When I want to partake of
Eucharist I make sure I attend church in person rather than just livestream
attend (we live in such an age, after all, though priests and pastors can bring
the sacramental elements to you if you’re a shut-in). Because I am not a
partisan of any form of Art Religion as it has been developed in European writings
and American spin-offs I don’t think listening to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in
the spirit in which Beethoven meant it actually makes you a better person
relative even to yourself, let alone to other people. I am “that” kind of low church Calvinist type
and for people who don’t know about how Christians who have read any Zwingli or
Calvin or Bullinger on the arts, we don’t regard the liberal arts as
sacraments. Nothing against the beautiful
art (formerly science) of music but Zwingli pointed out that David’s harp did
not in and of itself cast out King Saul’s evil spirit tormenter and that the
Holy Spirit’s use of music in this or that providential setting is not to be
construed as (or conflated with) some mystical power of music. Many partisans of Eurocentric Art Religion
obviously disagree!
That’s the nature of the conundrum or controversy that has
come up with Philip Ewell’s book, indirectly though the matter comes up. Ewell has mentioned that partisans of
European canonized music treat it like a religion and he is right about
that. I have been noticing over the
years that when partisans of art religion go on about their preferred Artists
and Art they tend to be bad at talking about sacraments. They are, to be blunt, incompetent in the
liturgical and sacramental aspects that should be clearest and simplest about
the ordinances and sacraments of their art asceticism or mysticism. The trouble
is, as I have noted elsewhere, the
role of music in epiclesis doesn’t automatically change because some people
say “that isn’t music” or “I don’t recognize the spirit that is moving these
people”.
I grew up Pentecostal and am now Anglican so I get that for
Pentecostals music is a way that God inhabits the praises of His People and
this is a belief you can find in Pentecostal churches of any color. It’s no coincidence to me that many battles
about aesthetic value come from partisans of the highest of highbrow Art
Religion who have not set foot in Pentecostal churches and it’s interesting to
me as I get older to consider, as I have mentioned in the past, that early rock
musicians hailed from Pentecostal churches.
Many a debate about the musical merits and demerits of musical genres
and styles have implicitly and explicitly religious roots. I don’t expect people to be Pentecostal or
Anglican but I do think that the debates about modes and forms of liturgy and
sacrament can be brought in to illuminate and maybe even elucidate aspects of
debates about Art and Music that Philip Ewell’s writing has sparked in the last
few years. It’s actually because I try to take my Christian faith seriously
that I take Ewell’s complaint about music theory and Eurocentric art religion
in musicology seriously whether or not I agree with everything he’s said or
written. Partisans of Art can have a
nasty habit of being dishonest about how recent their dogmatic innovation
actually is.
Through the ages guilds of actual liturgists, theologians
and musicians do (past, present and future) have defined what counts as good
and bad art and what counts as legitimate and illegitimate sacrament and
liturgy. Eurocentric Art Religion has
tended to be formulated and defended by men who, I’m afraid, couldn’t even
start to explain what is involved in a sacrament and don’t even care to (I’m
thinking particularly of the late Roger Scruton who claimed that there was more
and better theology of Eucharist in Wagner’s Parsifal than in books
written by theologians). And Scruton was
an Anglican. So surely he should have
been familiar with the Thirty-Nine Articles about things like what I have been
touching on here, that in the administration of sacraments debates about inner
and outer intention come up. If Scruton
thought John Cage was a charlatan and not a musician the least Scruton could
have done was to articulate his claim in terms of sacramentology. Cage was the kind of man who imputed so much
potency to the act of attentive listening that “it” became the sacrament rather
than the music that a highbrow highflyer like Scruton regarded as the necessary
precondition for the art religion sacrament.
Beethoven’s Ninth and not 4’33”. The Intention of Cage to make Art and the
Intention of his fans to hear his music as Art may not make 4’33” Art but would
that be the case for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or Mozart’s Requiem or
Mahler’s Fifth Symphony? For a Dutch Reformed anthropologist of religion
like Gerardus van der Leeuw African American spirituals were as sacred as a
Palestrina mass or a Mozart opera. Guy
Beck has pointed out that van der Leeuw and Rudolf Otto had conceptions of the
holy expressed in music that reached out well beyond Eurocentric concerns but
it is precisely the most Eurocentric conception of the numinous Roger Scruton
kept coming back to in spite of explicitly invoking the influence of Rudolf
Otto. The trouble was that Scruton was the kind of Anglican who saw Anglicanism
as English Christianity and not necessarily as a global expression of Christian
faith. Whether he’d have found much
common cause with Kenyan Anglicans I am not so sure. But it is in Anglican discussion of liturgy
and sacrament that I find all sorts of ways in which partisans of Art Religion
in the Wagnerian mold show themselves to be parasitically dependent on
literally religious discourse that, in the last century and a half, has had
more room for non-European musics to contribute to liturgy and sacrament than
defenders of the Great Tradition of European Art.
