The problem with music in Church

Although I have a feeling that, with all the work they put in, our schola prays the words of the Mass many times with their repeated singing of the propers during practice. For the rest of us, we’re only praying the words once, but hopefully you’re able to spend some time meditating on the words either before or after Mass…or during the homily.

St. Augustine never actually said that when we sing, we pray twice. Which isn’t to say that the famous phrase has no merit, but only that the great saint had a conflicted relationship with music.

For instance, in his Confessions, he writes, “our minds are more devoutly and earnestly elevated into a flame of piety by the holy words themselves when they are thus sung, than when they are not.” Music influences us to accept a fuller meaning of the words. This is good. This is why we sing when we’re happy. We sing happy birthday, or around the campfire, or alone in the car as loud as you can when nobody is watching and your favorite polyphonic Palestrina Mass comes on the radio. It’s one thing to say, “I love you,” it’s entirely another to arrive outside the window of your beloved with the guitar you play badly and serenade her. And this, for St. Augustine, is the root of the problem. Music is too influential.

When singing, he says, “the gratification of my flesh, to which the mind ought never to be given over to be enervated, often beguiles me, while the sense does not so attend on reason as to follow her patiently.” In other words, he’s saying that music enlivens our sensitive perceptions so much that we might be happily singing a song and, before we know it, we’re singing blasphemies or untruths because the music is so catchy. Meet me after Mass and I’ll name names, but basically my opinion is that pop music at this point needs to be abandoned entirely. This is also the reason we must be very, very careful with the music of Holy Mass. Music that primarily appeals to the emotions is dangerous. Historically, this is the music of heretics and schismatics. Conversely, the music of the Church, the chant that ornaments the words of sacred Scripture, it always appeals first to the intellect. Its harmony and beauty and melody serve the text, not the other way around. Then, on occasion, it will be the case that your intellect will overflow with joy. This is when music sensibly touches the heart and sustains your prayer. What’s happening is essentially the formation of the mind, will, and heart to that which is good, beautiful, and true.

This is why St. Augustine is conflicted. Ultimately, after warning about how music can be misused, he comes down enthusiastically on the side of singing. He says, “when I call to mind the tears I shed at the songs of [the] Church, at the outset of my recovered faith, and how even now I am moved not by the singing but by what is sung… [I] approve of the use of singing in the church, that so by the delights of the ear the weaker minds may be stimulated to a devotional frame.” Music and all the arts are necessary to us as incarnated creatures because beauty brings flesh to our faith. Beauty is vital, which is precisely why St. Augustine is so hesitant. We must use this great gift wisely and in accord with its purposes.

“Sing to the Lord a new song,” insists the Psalmist in the introit to this Mass. People hear the phrase “new song” and want to talk about hymns we like and joy fm radio and how soon we can get a drumkit in here for the kids to enjoy during the Agnus Dei. This all misses the point. It doesn’t even occur to the Psalmist that a new song would be anything other than chanted Scripture, music that serves the words and maintains a healthy relationship with human passions and emotions.

The point is that a new song is only sung by a new man. In our praise to God, our gift of beauty back to the one who is Beauty himself, we search out redemption, by which I mean God’s creativity and masterful artistry in re-making the human soul in the image of Christ. The song is Our Lord’s movement towards us in the incarnation and his subsequent movement back to Heaven with us cradled in his arms. We are new creatures, alive in Christ, redeemed and resurrected.

This means the new song is a beauty that ascends, that leads our minds upwards and into the throne room of Heaven. Our song joins the song that is being sung in Heaven by the saints and angels. It carries us with it like a rising melody. In joining his song to ours, Christ is singing us into being.

And this, friends, is about much more than a literal song. Of course, the literal song is important, but like all aspects of a life lived in Christ, the particular good of an individual action unfolds into eternal significance. This is to say that this all applies to you even if you can’t carry a tune. The point, here, is the metaphor for the very real way that beauty lifts us to Heaven.

T.S. Eliot always believe that music is a striving towards timelessness. It’s a yearning for duration, pushing eternity into the heart of time even as it flows past. It ornaments each fleeting moment with God’s presence, his beautiful grace, so that these moments become art that adorns time itself and connects it to eternity. God holds this great symphony in mind all at once. We can’t but we do our best. To the extent we enter the song, we participate in the great Now, the great I AM, like a point of intersection. The saints and angels are here. They sing the new song with us. There’s a compression by which the liturgy, this new song, rises up Jacob’s ladder and we are, even if only while the liturgy lasts, taken out of time and into a timeless realm.

Through the new song of the liturgy, the soul of man quickens to creation. Before God spoke, there was silence, which is why the chant of the Mass emerges from silence and returns to it. It is Christ, here with us, singing his song of love. Father Hopkins, for instance, prays,

ELECTED Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Our Lord’s movement from silence to song traces perfect circle. As James teaches, “Every best gift, and every perfect gift, is from above.” This is the Word come down from Heaven. And as Christ says to his disciples, “I go to him that sent me.” This is the song ascending back to Heaven.

So choose the object of your love, the reason for the song, the principle that adorns your life. It is Christ. We sing because we are in love with him.

“Sing with your voices,” says Augustine, “your hearts, your lips and your lives: Sing to the Lord a new song.”