Music, Freedom, and the Decisive Particular

This essay focuses on a major theological shift of outlook between the first rendition of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Leipzig in 1727 and the Berlin performances of 1829, seen in the emergence of a quest for a particular kind of freedom: ‘freedom from the decisive particular’. We chart some of the background to it in the eighteenth century in ‘natural religion’: in the search for a commonly shared religious sensibility, the suspicion of relying on the local and contingent in religious matters, and in the belief that the universal potential of religion should not be dependent on the historicity of concrete events. These are carried forward in the early nineteenth century, most clearly in the work of G.W.F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher. The latter, in particular, appropriates music in his account of religion. Music, more than any other art, can give voice to the dynamics of humanity’s primordial religious awareness precisely because of its relative freedom from historical contingencies. Something of this outlook seems to have characterized and informed the 1829 Bach performances. But it contrasts sharply with Leipzig in 1727: in eighteenth-century Lutheranism, it was taken as axiomatic that the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ were of decisive, ultimate significance for all other events. The essay concludes with some reflections on what can be learned from this contrast with respect to the conversation between music and theology today.

Waiting on Grace

Whereas much theology of religions regards ‘the other’ as a problem to be solved, this book begins with a Church called to witness to its faith in a multicultural world by practising a generous yet risky hospitality. A theology of dialogue takes its rise from the Christian experience of being-in-dialogue. Taking its rise from the biblical narrative of encounter, call, and response, such a theology cannot be fully understood without reference to the matrix of faith that Christians share in complex ways with the Jewish people. The contemporary experience of the Shoah, the dominating religious event of the twentieth century, has complexified that relationship and left an indelible mark on the religious sensibility of both Jews and Christians. Engaging with a range of thinkers, from Heschel, Levinas, and Edith Stein who were all deeply affected by the Shoah, to Metz, Panikkar, and Rowan Williams, who are always pressing the limits of what can and cannot be said with integrity about the self-revealing Word of God, this book shows how Judaism is a necessary, if not sufficient, source of Christian self-understanding. What is commended by this foundational engagement is a hope-filled ‘waiting on grace’ made possible by virtues of empathy and patience. A theology of dialogue focuses not on metaphysical abstractions but on biblical forms of thought about God’s presence to human beings which Christians share with Jews and, under the continuing guidance of the Spirit of Christ, learn to adapt to a whole range of contested cultural and political contexts.

Saving Abstraction

Saving Abstraction takes up the conflicted history of Morton Feldman’s most important collaboration—his work with Dominique and John de Menil on music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. These collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling. At the center of this study is the question of ecumenism—that is, in what terms can religious encounters be staged for fruitful dialog to take place? And how might abstraction (both visual and musical) be useful to achieving it? This was a dilemma for Feldman, whose music sought to produce sublime “abstract experience,” as well as for the de Menils, who envisioned the Rothko Chapel as a space for spiritual intervention into late modernity. Saving Abstraction develops two central concepts: “abstract ecumenism” and “agonistic universalism.” The former characterizes a broad spiritual orientation within postwar musical modernism and experimentalism that aspired to altered states of ego-loss. This emerged as a renewed religious sensibility in late modernist experimentalism. The latter concept describes the particular religious form that Feldman’s music achieves within Rothko Chapel—an ascetic mode of existence that endures hopefully the aporia of postwar modernization’s destructiveness and modernism’s failure to effectively counter it.

Form and Content in Buber’s and Schweid’s Literary-Philosophical Readings of Genesis

The following essay is presented as part of a long-term project concerned with the theory and practice of modern Jewish thinkers as interpreters of the Bible. The recent Bible commentaries of Eliezer Schweid, who is one of the foremost Jewish scholars and theologians active in Israel today, are analyzed in comparison with parallel interpretations of Martin Buber, with special reference to the first chapters of Genesis. Their respective analyses of Biblical narrative reveal notable similarities in their treatment of the literary “body” of the text as the key to its theological significance. Nonetheless, Buber articulates religious experience largely “from the human side,” striving to mediate Biblical consciousness to the contemporary humanistic mindset, while Schweid positions himself more as the clarion of the “prophetic writers” for whom the fear of God, no less than the love of God, must inform an authentic religious sensibility. Schweid’s more theocentric perspective has great import for contemporary issues such as the universal covetousness engendered by the violation of our ecological covenant with the Earth.

Shelleyan Love

In this chapter, I show that Percy Shelley picks up on the waning of intellectual love in Wordsworth, continuing to develop this Romantic tradition after Wordsworth moves on to a more religious sensibility. The chapter outlines the development of Percy Shelley’s treatment of love over the entire course of his career. I examine five ‘clusters’ of writings that reveal his adoption, adaption, and revision of Wordsworthian, Godwinian, and Classical notions of love: (1) his essay ‘On Love’ (1819) and its related texts; (2) Queen Mab (1813) and the Alastorvolume (1815); (3) a sequence of lyrics from 1816-1818; (4) the Prometheus Unbound volume (1820); and (5) Epipsychidion (1821) and later poems. Shelleyan love has received the most scholarly attention in studies of Romanticism, yet it is almost always within the contexts of sex, sexuality, and metaphor; instead, I argue that Shelleyan love can also be understood as an aesthetic model of interconnectedness proposing a nascent negative dialectics, a concept developed by Theodor Adorno that both defers and affirms the reconciliation of subject and object at the heart of critical theory and love.

Marcus Aurelius (AD 121–80)

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Emperor of Rome, was the author of a book of philosophical reflections written in Greek and known as the Meditations. These reflections are based primarily on Stoicism, but also reveal the influence of other currents of thought and of his experience as emperor. Marcus was deeply influenced by Epictetus and shares his interest in the inner mental life and the psychology of moral improvement. He combines a deep commitment to the providential cosmology traditional in the Stoic school with a more pronounced religious sensibility and a frequent emphasis on the insignificance of human life in space and time. The Stoic recognition of the irreducibly social character of human nature is obviously pertinent to an emperor whose career consisted largely of self-sacrificing public service.

Bruce Springsteen as Post-Christian Pastor

This article explores how Bruce Springsteen embodies a North American/Western European twenty-first century religious sensibility that encompasses a secular outlook but is colored by the Christian tradition and is informed by biblical language, images, and ideals. Because Springsteen is able to give voice to an orientation to the world that resonates with the experiences, aspirations, and religious understanding of those who have grown up in the same world as him, Springsteen has become a pastoral/priestly figure to the extensive community that identifies with his work.

The Kingdom of Freedom in the Garden of God: Ferguson's Postulates of Moral Action

Similar to Immanuel Kant, Adam Ferguson links freedom of the will, the existence of God, and immortality to the possibility of moral conduct. We explore these three dimensions of Ferguson's thought across several of his works. Ferguson's account of these postulates of morality not only anticipates Kant but incorporates a religious sensibility that manifests an appeal to nature rather than scripture.