Psalm 149:1-4
“Praise the Lord! Sing to the Lord a new song, sing his praises in the assembly of his believers! Let Israel rejoice in him who made him; let the sons of Zion rejoice in their King; let them praise his name with games, let them praise him with drum and harp. For the Lord delights in his people and glorifies the wretched by saving them.”1
The music people create is an artistic reflection of the eternity that man contemplates in God’s creation. Acceptance of this view of music, namely, its investment as a vehicle for making revelation explicit, has important consequences for Christianity. According to the theologian Thomas Aquinas, beauty is the splendor of order.2 Following this aesthetic logic, traced by the Catholic saint from the 13th century, music points to the order established by the creator. In this way it becomes a celebration, a state of exuberant wonder at the glory of this order, but also an adoration of the one who orders things for our good. Worship is a fundamental characteristic of man in the face of divine perfection, which comes with the privilege of God’s discovery. Therefore man is bound to worship him and to lift up to God songs of praise and thanksgiving together with all the saints.3 And so the elect, that is, the saints, are no longer the pure ones, the ones untouched by the world and its struggles, but they become the ones through whom the beauty of divine perfection is witnessed, so that the world together with them may be purified from falling into itself. The world does not have this beauty in it, but it only reflects it.
Therefore, if we want to talk about music and the sense of the sacred, we will first deal with the characteristics that historical churches have defined to separate sacred from secular music. A very good example are the instructions on church music in the Motu Propio, given by Pope Pius X in 1903. They set out three major criteria that are necessary for music to be validated as sacred.4,5
The first criteria concerns holiness itself and the particular way in which the church views this aspect of its services. In this case, we are talking about holiness as opposed to profanity. The term profane has its origin in a Latin term “profanus”, which literally means outside the temple. Therefore sacredness in ecclesial music has to do with setting it apart from what happens in the communion of saints. That is, those who gather together to celebrate the saving reality of Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection. Our worship music, then, is required to be set apart from the things we pursue as citizens of this world’s empire. If we seek what the world values and not what a sanctified heart loves, we will necessarily end up trivializing and turning music into a commercial commodity. For God gives, not sells salvation. Or the opposite would be to turn sacred music into an elitist art form that delights the refined intellect but leaves the body immersed in itself.
The second criterion speaks of formal excellence, of elevating this music to the level of art so that its message is sharp and effective. In other words: praise of God is required to be associated with excellence. Too much emphasis on this aspect can lead to formal rigidity at the cost of excluding authenticity in the act of praise. The result is a rejection of the theologically and aesthetically uneducated, and we know that we all sit at the same table with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. However, the third criterion proposed by Pope Pius X comes to balance the first two. He therefore succeeds in harmonizing and unifying the possibility of experiencing the sacred through this music.
The third principle speaks of universality and the impact that this sacred music needs to have on all listeners. In the sense that beyond culture and ethnicity, beyond the spoken language, which through its meanings allows access to the conceptual meaning of the message, sacred music must invoke a sense of worship and reverence in everyone who hears it. Worship thus speaks of humility, of the limitation of our fragile nature and of the encounter with the One who guides our destinies beyond our power to predict and control reality. So such music needs to evoke in the listener the character of divine glory and greatness, that which overwhelms and surpasses the height of the human spirit.
But all of these principles, in this case, speak to the fact that sacred music has the role of providing the optimal framework for the Gospel message to proclaim its transforming truth. It makes no difference whether we are referring to the liturgy of Catholic and Orthodox churches, or to the service conducted in Protestant contexts.
But this truth that transfigures the heart in the depths of its experience is closely related to the way God’s holiness is manifested in the biblical message. Without understanding God’s holiness, and here I am not referring to the conceptual categories that have been used to describe it, but I am talking about God’s holiness as a dynamic and active process in history, we too cannot participate as transmitters in the spread of this saving message. Biblical Hebrew uses the term kedushah (קְדֻשָּׁה) to describe God’s holiness and attributes the meaning of distinguished, set apart for that which is called holy. But what essentially distinguishes biblical thought from the rest of the forms of holiness that appear in other world religions is that it proposes an interdependence and complementarity of personal sanctification in relation to the sanctification of the world. Rabbinic literature thus distinguishes two forms of man’s approach to sanctification. The first is called: ish ha-da’at, the universally religious person, as Rabbi Rav Soloveitchik calls it, and embodies the man who sees escape from the body as an imperative spiritual endeavor. This is in contrast to the second form of sanctification, the ish halakha approach, for whom the body is neither considered something demonic nor something to be glorified. For him, every physical activity is sanctified, bringing God’s law and order to every endeavor undertaken. For this man there is nothing in this world that is without God’s imprint. The way one conducts one’s business, the way one eats or loves, are not actions that belong to the realm of the profane, but are also elements of sanctification in the same measure as prayer, scripture study or fasting. For the Bible teaches us not to escape from this world into eternity but to bring eternity into this world.7
These rules are intended to protect the special character of sacred music. We do not wish to trivialize this music and turn it into an amorphous pile of vulgar elements, but it must necessarily be integrated into the whole of the sacredness of life, just as the ish halakha approach proposes. So, while it is important to preserve the sanctity of what unites us as a community, it is equally important to sanctify every aspect of our life, for as the Jews say: the profane is nothing other than what has not yet been sanctified.7 Thus, it awaits our readiness to sanctify it by reinterpreting it in the light of the divine.
Bibliography:
1.Psalm 149
2.Andrew Wilson-Dickson, The Story of Christian Music (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996),12
3.The Role of Sacred Music in the Transformation of Society
4.On Sacred Music
5.https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/profanus
6.Instructions on music according to Motu Proprio, edict given by Pope Pius X on 22/11/1903
7.kadosh – on the meaning of holiness in Jewish thought
