William Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors.

 

This lecture was written for the Sixth Annual Will’n in Weslaco Festival, South Texas College, Weslaco, Texas, April 8, 2025.

 

“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”

John Locke: An Essay on Civil Government. Book II, Chapter xviii, Section 202.

 

“Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying insofar as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.”

Agnes Repplier: In Pursuit of Laughter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1936.

 

The Comedy of Errors presents these themes of law and laughter, of law and nature. What are the tensions between these two pairs? Can they be reconciled?

We know that this play was performed a part of Christmastime celebration at Gray’s Inn, which was one of the four Inns of Court in London. the inns were professional associations for lawyers and judges which also served as la schools. Part of the seasonal fund was the election of a Lord of Misrule, typically a student whose reign was mercifully brief and whose powers were prudently limited. The strictness of the rule of law and of lawyers relaxed for the holiday celebrating the birth of Christ, Redeemer of souls guilty before the Law of God.

The Comedy of Errors is perfect for such an occasion and it’s not untimely in today’s circumstances, either. Students still take over some elite university campuses, and they are nothing if not lords of misrule when they do.

Not only that, but in the play there’s a trade war going on.

It would be a comedy of error on my part if I tried to summarize Shakespeare’s wild and twisty plot, and that would take the fun out of watching the play. But I do want to show how the play, for all the laughs, brings out some serious points about law, about ruling and misruling, and especially about how, in ruling, we can weigh evidence and testimony in order to make just and wise judgements  in the face of confusion: the face of confusion often being what we see all around us, and also when we look in the mirror.

Although I won’t attempt a plot summary, I will pay particular attention to the play’s first scene and its last scene.

So: What’s so funny about the law? Judging from the play’s first scene, nothing at all. The law is serious, and it can turn deadly. Syracuse and Ephesus began as city-states—as sovereign in their day as the United Sates, Mexico, and Canada are today. Each was a major commercial country—Syracuse, a Sicilian city founded by Greeks from the city-state of Corinth, eventually served as a trading link between Eastern and Western Christendom.

By the time of the actions depicted in the play, Christianity evidently has been introduced, however, which means that these cities are now under imperial rule—probably of Rome, since the Duke of Ephesus, Solinus, has a Roman name. The Apostle Paul evangelized in Syracuse and of course his Letter to the Ephesians when those cities were part of the Roman Empire.

Neither secular empire nor the sacred empire of the Church stops these cities from acting like sovereign states, however, at least when it comes to trade. And their trade war isn’t just a matter of reciprocal tariffs, either; Ephesus has banned Syracusans from the country, in response to harsh penalties enacted by the Duke of Syracuse on Ephesian merchants. Illegal interlopers from Syracuse must pay a heavy fine or pay the ultimate penalty of death. City states generally took citizenship, and therefore ‘foreignness,’ more seriously than many do today and when they fought a trade war, they played for keeps. You won’t find much talk about ‘globalization’ among the ancient Greeks and Romans, or among the European states of Shakespeare’s time, for that matter. Shakespeare’s Ephesus makes its own laws regarding trade, and indeed the old empires allowed subject nations a considerable degree of self-rule.

Where does law, severe or mild, come from? To take a prominent example, Moses receives the laws of Israel from God, the supreme Ruler. The ancient city-states often supposed that their laws were divinely ordained, with each city having its own protecting and oftentimes lawgiving deity: for both Ephesus and Syracuse, it was Artemis—Diana, in the Roman pantheon. Now, in Christendom, they still have women as patron, or should I say matron, saints: Agatha for Sicily, Hermione for Ephesus, both associated with the power of healing. With the coming of Christianity, then, they exchanged the goddess of the hunt for saints of health.

Secular regimes also derive their laws from rulers—that is, from the regime of the country. Regimes consist of four components: rulers (one, few, or many, good or bad); the ruling offices the rulers occupy; the way of life governed by those rulers and ruling offices; there is, finally, the purpose or purposes that the rulers, ruling offices, and way of life aim at. As mentioned, the purpose of the Ephesian and the Syracusan regimes is commercial prosperity, and they achieved it.

Law isn’t supposed to be funny, and in the play’s first scene it doesn’t look like it will be. This comedy begins as if it will be a tragedy. In Shakespeare generally, comedy and tragedy are on a knife’ edge; one might easily turn into the other, and in most of his plays the genres are mixed, often with comic and tragic scenes interspersed. Solinus, the name of the Duke of Ephesus, means ‘solitary one’; he rules as a monarch. In the ancient world and up to and including Shakespeare’s time, monarchs were not primarily what we think of today. While they were ‘commanders in chief’ in wartime, in peacetime they were not primarily ‘executives’ but judges. That’s why to this day we speak of a ‘king’s court.’ We encounter Solinus in his role as a judge in a legal case.

Aegeon is a merchant from Syracuse, arrested under the Ephesian law banning Syracusans. Since he’s obviously guilty as charged, he throws himself on the mercy of the court, telling a tragic story of family separation. Decades earlier, he and his wife, Aemilia, had twin sons for whom he purchased twin slaves when they were all in their infancy. A few years later, the family suffered shipwreck in a storm. Father, one son and his slave were rescued by one ship; his wife, one son and his slave were rescued by another, taking them to different cities, the destination of each unknown to the other. Upon reaching adulthood, the son and slave who remained with Aegeon went on a mission to find their lost brothers and never returned. Aegeon embarked on what has been a five-year mission to find them, coming to Ephesus only as a last desperate resort.

The law he has violated is a convention—not a divine or natural but a man-made thing—enacted by the Ephesian regime, which intends to defend its commerce, its way of life aimed at the purpose of citizens’ prosperity—arguably, a natural human purpose. By contrast, the purpose of Aegeon’s mission has no conventional content; it is entirely natural: to reunite his family. We see its natural character in the fact that it’s a search that has proceeded through many countries, many regimes with many sets of legal conventions. In Aristotle’s book, the Politics, families are the building blocks of political communities, of city-states, giving them a natural foundation. Thus, the legal conventions of Ephesus now collide with human nature in a legal case. Right at the beginning of his play, Shakespeare has the full attention of those lawyers, judges, and law students of Gray’s Inn, who are responsible for cases at trial under English common law within the English regime, which is also a monarchy, one that is part of Christendom but recently had separated from Roman Catholic Christendom in an act of sovereignty taken by the father of the current monarch, Elizabeth I.

Duke Solinus keeps to the letter of the law: he tells Aegeon to raise money to pay the fine in 24 hours or suffer death by beheading. The Duke’s argument in justifying his sternness—his tragic judgment, if you will—may seem tyrannical to us in modern America, but it is crucial to understand that we are looking at it through the lens of our own regime, a democratic and commercial republic, where we are often encouraged to ‘Question authority.’ That isn’t the traditional way of understanding law or of understanding the rulers who make and enforce the law, either in the ancient world or in Christendom. The Apostle Paul famously tells his missionaries to respect the ruler, who “wields not the sword in vain”—a ruler who was then a pagan, and sometimes a persecutor of Christians. The difference between our moral sensibility and that of other regimes suggests that our judgments are crucially influenced by the regime we live in.

It therefore takes an effort for us to consider the argument the Duke make in the case of a foreign merchant who has knowingly or unknowingly violated Ephesian law, for an understandable natural purpose. He doesn’t blame Aegeon’s plight on Aegeon, but on “the fates”—the winds that caused the shipwreck, the initial cause in the sequence of events that brought him to this trial. Solinus tells the defendant, “We may pity, though not pardon thee.” Why not?

Because the law is the law, and the regime behind that law (“my crown, my oath”—notice, an obligation—and indeed “my dignity and my “honor”) require that the regime’s laws be respected, that the laws be taken seriously and not ‘comically. Laws laxly enforced become laws ‘in name only,” comical, things of derision. What we call the rule of law is really the rule of men and women who follow the law, a set of laws made by God or by human beings, but in either case necessarily ‘solemnized,’ obeyed. And even ‘we democrats’ know that. We know that there come circumstances in every regime when legal justice can no longer be tempered by mercy, or the regime will collapse in a crisis of dishonor, of disrespect, of comedy. Satire is an engine of such disrespect. As the Bible says, God is not to be mocked. Shakespeare audience of legal authorities, of dignitaries, expect citizens to stand up when the judge enters the courtroom. Even democratic America’s Judge Judy, no stranger to comedy, expects and demands that.

Another way to put it is that Solinus is a monarch, but he is a constitutional monarch. He is not a lawless tyrant. John Locke could not find fault with him, in that regard. I emphasize this so that you’ll see the themes of the play clearly, as Shakespeare sets them up from the outset, themes that must be understood in the way they were understood by learned and intelligent ‘men of the law’ in the English regime of his time.

But just as the convention of law has a sort of nature to it, a serious and potentially tragic nature, just as it sets limit on comedy, and especially on mockery, legal convention also has its limits. Law and respect for law are necessary to the regime, but their consequences may contradict justice when it governs what lawyers call ‘a hard case’—a case that the legislators who framed the law did not, could not, anticipate. Can such tragic consequences of legal reasoning be averted by comedy—that is, by the kind of natural reasoning that, first, recognizes how circumstances alter cases—what jurists call ‘equity’—and second, that the circumstances that Solinus and Aegeon both understand are not all the circumstances of the case he has adjudicated?

Laws govern both city-states and the households within them; there is tariff and criminal law; there is also marital law. In Ephesus, the city-state law is violated by the arrival of Aegeon; the marital law i challenged, if not intentionally violated, by the arrival of the twins from Syracuse. Their arrival also challenges criminal law, as it relates to commerce, as seen in the errors surrounding the gold chain that the goldsmith, Angelo, mistakenly gives to the Syracusan Antipholus, because he confuses him with his Ephesian twin—a circumstance to which I shall return.

With reasoning beyond the strictures of the law, comedy begins—the chance for a happy ending. A monarch/judge needs first to know the law; second, he needs to know the facts of the case, the real evidence; he finally needs to make a reasoned judgment base on that law and those facts, which really provide the circumstances of the case. A sound judgment doesn’t ‘print out’ a good result, lie a photocopier attached to a computer. A sound judgment takes practical reasoning in addition to legal reasoning, which deduces guilt or innocence from the letter of the law. Notice that these three steps constitute an ascent, an ascent from convention, from law, to the nature of the actions taken by the accused and the accuser, and finally to the exercise of natural, prudential reason, which is the distinctive characteristic of human nature and the basis of right judgment, not only in law courts but in our lives, generally.

This is comic, not tragic because tragedies end like Hamlet, with dead bodies on the floor, including the bodies of persons who didn’t deserve to die, whereas comedies end happily, whether it is in marriage (as they often do in Shakespeare) or in the philosophic death of Socrates 9who contentedly dies so that philosophy may live on, or in the Divine Comedy of Dane, where God’s judgments are understood to be both just and merciful. God’s judgments are always right because God knows the true identity of those He judges. Human judges are less reliable, and they need to understand that. They need ways of discovering the true identities of those accused and of their accusers who appear before the court.

The Comedy of Errors therefore proceeds more philosophically than religiously, by reason not by divine revelation. It proceeds a bit like an argument in a Platonic dialogue—an argument, however, in actions, with errors made and opinions exposed as incorrect by means of human sense perception and human reasoning—both fallible.

First, let’s take a look at sense perception. Both slave twins are named “Dromio.” ‘Dromio’ means ‘path’ or ‘way. The slavish path to knowledge, its way of knowing, is by sense perception. We see this especially in Act III, Scene 1, where Ephesian Dromio, having earlier suffered a beating from Syracusan Antipholus, replies to his real master’s denial of having struck him, “I know what I know.” When it comes to knowledge, his physical experience, his sense perceptions, cannot give way to his master’s authority. And he’s right: He was beaten, only wrong in mistaking his master for his master’s identical twin. His simplest sense, touch, which registers bodily pain and pleasure, gave him part of the truth, even as another sense perception, from sight, deceived him.

In one sense, the senses are always right he really did get beaten, and he really did see a man who looked exactly like his master. Sight is a higher sense than touch. Touch perceives only parts of things, out of their ‘context,’ their surroundings. Sight gives us a picture, often a bigger picture, than touch can do. Also, we can rely on sight more readily to reveal the identities of one another, the inner ‘regimes,’ so to speak, the souls and the purposes souls pursue, motives. Sight perceives facial expressions, ‘body language’; the eyes are the ‘windows of the soul’ both for looking out and for looking in. But physical sight of course cannot fully disclose a soul. The senses need to be supplemented with reasoning about the evidence presented to the human mind by the senses. That is a task preeminently for rulers, not slaves. Slaves are tasked with obedience, rulers with responsibility.

The path of natural reasoning runs roughly because the human mind easily misconstrues the facts, the evidence that bodily senses bring before it to judge. That is how masters can mistake rational actions of other masters and slaves as irrational. Rational Luciana (her name means ‘light’) mistakes Syracusan Antipholus for Ephesian Antipholus, who is unhappily married to her sister. When the Syracusan truthfully denies that he is married and, having fallen in love at first sight, proposes marriage to her, she doesn’t fall back on her senses as her source of knowledge (as in “I know what I know”) but arrives at a seemingly reasonable explanation of the contradiction: Antipholus must have gone mad; he must have lost his reason. Her error is to reason from a false premise.

Another way in which the human mind deceives itself is to interpret sense-evidence through the soul’s passions. Luciana’s sister, Adriana (which means ‘dark’) is near madness, herself, maddened by jealousy. Jealousy darkens her mind. Passions, such as jealousy, impede reasoning, distorting the mind’s judgement of the evidence the senses place before it. Both lucid Luciana and mind-darkened Adriana contribute to the derangement of their household, the first by reasoning from false premises, the second by abandoning reason altogether.

Superstition is yet another impediment to reasoning. On several occasions, those who mistake the identity of one twin for another assume that they are witnessing sorcery, witchcraft, deviltry, demonic possession. This evokes not the passion of jealousy but the passion of fear. Ephesus had a reputation for such supernatural things, and the Apostle Paul takes them with supreme seriousness Shakespeare presents the as still another source of error, as illusory, indeed delusory, opinions purporting to explain the naturally occurring actions of natural persons by supernatural influences. This is no small point, especially when made before lawyers, judges, and law students. Witch trials were not unknown in Shakespeare’s Europe, and his Puritan countrymen would bring the practice to New England, not many years later. Shakespeare suggests to men of the law: Are you quite sure of the evidence? Such errors derange city-states, as fear leads either to cowardice or to rage, passions, and thus to injustice, ruinous to good regimes, and conducive to tyranny. His comedy implies a limit to the law, a rational limit.

To put it in terms of the play, the double duality of two sets of twins embodies the dualities of the world in which we make judgments, a world of appearance and reality, passions and reason, misrule and good rule, tragedy and comedy. It is very easy to mistake one element of those pairs for its opposite. Shakespeare’s well-known and sometimes criticized fondness for puns, for words with double meanings, exemplifies this in the very way he uses language. In fact, the Greek word for ‘speech,’ logos, means both speech and reason. Speech, words, can clarify or confuse our reasoning.

Given this duality of human perception, reasoning, speech, how to avoid tragedy, how to obtain a comic—that is, happy, reasonable ending, a just verdict in trials but more broadly, good judgment in the life you live?

Act Five begins with the apparent violation of the city’s law pertaining to commerce. Angelo the goldsmith is assuring his creditor that he, Angelo, will soon receive payment for the gold chain he sold to Ephesian Antipholus, a man of “most reverend reputation.” He doesn’t really believe that Antipholus deserves such a reputation, or such reverence, however. He thought he’d delivered the chain, but he gave it to the wrong Antipholus. When he later demanded payment from Ephesian Antipholus, that estimable gentleman denied having receive the chain; Angelo had him arrested. He’s only buying time with his creditor. Now, he sees Syracusan Antipholus, who is wearing the chain, and he’s duly outraged at the apparent injustice, lying, double-dealing.

Before Angelo or his creditor can do anything, Adriana enters the scene. She misidentifies this Antipholus as her husband and demands that he and his slave be bound and returned home. Deeming them all mad, the Syracusans flee from both sets of accusers to the sanctuary of a nearby priory.

Th Abbess of the priory arrives and questions Adriana, concluding that she has driven her husband mad. “The venom clamors of a jealous woman / Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.” Unquiet meals, she explains, lead to indigestion and fire in the stomach causes madness. That is, regardless of her religious status, the Abbess understands matters in terms of nature not of demonic possession. She refuses to release her supposed husband to her, ruling that she’ll bring him back to sanity herself, an intention consistent with Ephesus’s matron saint. For her part, Adriana can only think that she’s lost her husband to another woman, after all!

When Solinus and Aegeon walk past, on their way to the latter’s beheading, Adriana, at Luciana’s urging, begs the Duke’s intervention. Evidently, a mere execution can await the resolution of her dilemma. He agrees to negotiate with the Abbess—given the independence of Church authority from secular authority, he cannot simply command her, but his stated reason for initiating an informal judicial inquiry on the spot is his respect for Antipholus’ wartime service to Ephesus.

At this point, the real Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio charge in, this Antipholus demanding justice against his wife on the grounds that she has locked him out of his house. Adriana, who saw the man she supposed to be her husband escape into the priory, and now at the end of what wit she has, recurs to superstition, imagining that he must have the power to move invisibly, saying, it is all “past thought of human reason.” She has, in her own way, reached the same modest conclusion Socrates reached about himself: Unlike Dromio, who says he knows what he knows, she knows that she does not know. The supremely self-assured accuser has reached her own ‘teachable moment.’ 

For moment, Aegeon seems doomed to die, Ephesian Antipholus and Adriana doomed to divorce, and Angelo can’t know what to do about his gold chain. Public justice, domestic justice, and commercial justice are all on that knife edge ready to fall into tragedy. To the Duke, they all seem mad.

The most helpless person tries to save the day. Aegeon identifies Ephesian Antipholus, whom he hasn’t actually seen in more than two decades, as his son—easily enough, of course, since he is identical to his other son, whom he last saw only five years ago. Since this Antipholus cannot know his father, everyone takes the old man to be senile. But when Syracusan Antipholus emerges from the priory with his slave, the confusion quickly resolves. Now, everyone’s sense of sight finally perceives the whole picture, and they can reason rightly, from correct premises. And finally, when the Abbess is revealed as Aemilia, Aegeon’s long-lost wife, the family is reunited. In legal terms, they have been “made whole.” Nature and law now coincide. Aemilia means ‘rival,’ and the Abbess has indeed rivaled her daughter-in-law, but in a satisfactory way with a just result: each Antipholus is restored to his father and to the right women: Ephesian Antipholus to his wife and mother, Syracusan Antipholus to his mother, with a real prospect of getting a rational wife for himself. The original married couple are together, with both their sons and their slaves restored to them and to one another.

Domestic justice has been served. But what of political justice, criminal and commercial? The case of the gold chain will be no problem, but the criminal case is more difficult. The Duke pardons Aegeon. Before, he had steadfastly enforced the rule of law. What has changed? Surely not the law; surely not the fact that Aegeon has violated it.

Solinus now has corroborating evidence that Aegeon’s story is true, but he believed him initially, anyway. The law is still the law. But now he knows that Aegeon’s Ephesian son is not only the merchant respected and even loved throughout the city, a man to whom he owes a debt of gratitude for his military service to the city and its regime, but he also knows that the debt Ephesian Antipholus has asked him to repay by prosecuting Adriana can now be discharged by pardoning the man now known to be his father. And he also knows that his prisoner is the husband of the eminently respectable Abbess of the priory, a person he is unlikely to wish to offend.

“Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail / Of you, my sons,” Aemilia tells them. “Travail” is a synonym for labor, for giving birth, and thirty-three is the traditional estimate of the number of years Jesus lived on earth. Her sons do indeed seem born again, to her. As for the two Dromios, whose mother sold them into slavery, they now celebrate not a miracle but their natural equality: “We came into this world like brother and brother, / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other.” Birth order, a product fate or chance, is irrelevant to justice.

What can a playwright, a man of no high social standing in Elizabethan England, teach a distinguished gathering at Gray’ Inn? Since the men of the law are on holiday, this may be what we now call a ‘teachable moment.’ Shakespeare builds on the fact that English lawyers had won the separation of the common law from the Church’s canon law, centuries earlier. But that boundary needs to be guarded by its inheritor, his audience. Do not, he suggests, assume that witches and demons are the cause of apparently irrational behavior. And even down-to-earth sense perception is not unimpeachable evidence, and a physiological/’scientific’ diagnosis of madness may prove mistaken. The Comedy of Errors sees a family and a city saved from hasty judgments based on false or incomplete premises. The monarch-judge and his subjects learn the true premise the Socratic way as enacted, as set in motion by actors on stage: by testing the various conflicting stories they hear and by finding the rationally coherent overall story that accounts for each piece of each person’s narrative—the comprehensive argument that encompasses all the others in a non-contradictory way. That is comedy’s happy ending, the triumph of reason over unreason. The true Christmastide Lord of Misrule at Gray’s Inn is William Shakespeare.

 

Ann Hartle: What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022.

 

Looking at what Montaigne famously called “the human condition” as it is now, Ann Hartle finds the “post-modern, post-Christian Western world” characterized both by “unprecedented personal freedom,” which the philosopher would have liked, and “deep cultural division,” which he saw in the world of his own time and sought to remedy. This suggests that the establishment of personal freedom does not guarantee civil peace. And in fact, “with the deepening of cultural differences, civility has deteriorated alarmingly.” Montaigne means civility to be “the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the modern Western world,” although the idea and practice itself “goes back as far as ancient Rome.” Why has it “disappeared” from so much of our public and private life? 

At one point, it appeared. Civility as a constellation of virtues, including “promise keeping, generosity, compassion forgiveness, trust, toleration, openness, sincerity, self-disclosure, and similar qualities,” amounts to a set of social virtues—as in the phrase, ‘civil society.’ Civil society exists under the carapace of the modern, centralized state; ‘liberal’ states protect civil society and its virtues, often held to derive from the rights of individuals (as members of that society and/or as natural persons), whereas ‘totalitarian’ states attempt to extend their rule into every aspect of civil society—often at the expense of civility and indeed the lives of individuals, no longer citizens but subjects. This is why the decline of civility in the modern world, under the modern state, worries people, even as the roughened edges of what remains of civil-social life disturbs them.

“How and when does this modern notion of civility come on the scene?” Hartle traces its origin to the Reformation, which “destroyed the unity of Christendom, rejecting the authority of tradition,” although it received its first articulation in the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, no Protestant and indeed no Christian. Montaigne picks up the pieces, as it were, of shattered Christendom, fashioning a “new order,” a “transformation of and alternative to both classical and Christian types,” that is, the two elements of Thomist Christianity, traditional Roman Catholicism. Montaigne proposes himself “as an example or type of a new moral character,” an example that evidently proved “an attractive possibility to his contemporaries.” This possibility entailed a turning away from the aristocratic standard of honor, of publicly recognized military and political virtue, along with a turn toward the substitution of compassion for Christian agape. He urges his contemporaries, especially his fellow gentlemen, towards a way of life that esteems and guards privacy, protecting individuals from intrusive question of religious faith from religio-political authorities and protecting what had been Christendom from wars sparked by the ambitions of honor-loving aristocrats. It is noteworthy that three centuries after Montaigne, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville would still be addressing the question, ‘What shall we do with the titled aristocrats?’ That is because Montaigne’s project is a solution to one problem (religio-political strife) that brings another problem with it: civil societies guarantee a form of liberty or freedom that “comes from doing away with the orientation to the divine that is essential to the tradition” from which Montaigne has composed his ‘construct.’ “Civility is built on the ruins of the very civilization that alone can give it life.”

Following the tripartite definition of a “project” seen in Rémi Brague’s The Kingdom of Man, Hartle orders her book into three sets of chapters. The modern project implies a “new beginning,” a rejection of the past; “the idea of the autonomy of the acting subject,” now severed or freed from the tradition; and a pathway designed to assure the project’s future completion. The tradition Montaigne aims to replace, which the “violent civil and religious conflict” of his time had called into question, was “the direction of human being to the divine,” a direction only a few can achieve fully. As a consequence, those with the leisure to direct themselves toward religious meditation and action, philosophic contemplation, and political rule will require political communities in which the many engage in “servile occupations” that support the way of life of the few. “Montaigne wants to replace that foundation with a philosophical foundation for equality and freedom,” which will require “the transformation of philosophy itself” as “his first and most fundamental task.” What Montaigne calls “detachment” of himself from himself, from the “natural man,” this act of “reflection” or “philosophical self-consciousness,” bring a denial that nature has a purpose, a telos. The philosopher, now a detached observer, must now exercise “judgment,” no longer the comparison of himself to a natural standard, which Montaigne denies, but to form the set of “accidents” that has been called “nature” into a shape serving an end “determined by the human will.” This is what Machiavelli had called the mastery of Fortuna, what Bacon would soon be calling the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Montaigne’s “New Adam, then, is not the created being who stands in wondering contemplation of the world and its Creator, but the judge who orders all things in accordance with his will.” In this new order, “the good” becomes “value,” that is, “the good in relation to man.” “All things are now revalued according to the standard of man as man, not according to the standard of the tradition, nature, and the divine.” In the present, Montaigne’s new beginning issues in what was later called liberalism, a society in which “the individual is free to seek the satisfaction of his particularity,” a society that functions in accordance with the new beginning that denies any common good inherent in nature. If, as Montaigne writes, “the greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself,” then this knowledge, once achieved, will undergird civility, a smiling acceptance of one’s fellow self-belonging, equal individuals. The “greatness” of aristocrats “has been transformed from the public display of noble deeds to the hiddenness of self-possession.” For its part, “civility replaces the social bond of the tradition in the absence of the possibility of moral community.” Civility makes possible the enactment of a central liberal political principle, “equality under the law.” This is the pathway toward the fully civil society, in which what Montaigne calls the “sociable wisdom” of the new philosophers, of whom Montaigne is the first.

Accordingly, Hartle begins with the philosophic, religious, and social-political condition of pre-Reformation Europe, with its “interweaving of the sacred and the social” forming “a very strong social bond” seen in “the divine liturgy, in the celebration of the Eucharist, where the loftiest theologian was at one with the last educated laborer.” This is why Tocqueville could say that democracy—defined as social equality—became widespread only with the advent of Christianity. To be sure, well-defined social hierarchy remained; the theologian would return to his study, to his life of theorizing, the laborer to the scaffolding, to his life of practice. But each was equal before God, and that was the important thing. It was the important thing because Thomism, combining Christian faith with Aristotelian philosophy, understood the purpose of human life as the perfection of human nature, a perfection which each person would strive for, within his place in the social hierarchy. “The worth of [human] activities does not depend upon human choice but on their intrinsic worth within the natural order.” Because the capacity to reason distinguishes human beings from other animals, the life of reason, the theoretical life, fulfils the potentialities of human nature most completely. “Philosophy is free because it is useless,” unlike the many practical arts; “that is, it serves no end outside itself.” Pace, Karl Marx: “The philosopher does not want to change the world but simply to understand it in its first causes.” “Leisure is the receptive attitude of the mind toward being, and contemplation is the act in which the world is brought into the mind: the mind becomes what it knows.” Because God is the first of all causes, theology is the queen of the sciences, of the philosophic ways of knowing. Even the pre-Christian Aristotle “held that philosophy, the highest human activity, is in some sense divine.” Religious tradition “does not limit or restrict philosophical questioning” but rather “preserves wonder and mystery, for it hands down a truth that is not limited by the human mind,” recognizing “the mysterious character of the world.”

Thomist Christianity adds the theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—to the moral virtues—courage, moderation, prudence, and justice. In ethical life, again as seen both in Aristotle and the Bible, all of the virtues “benefit the city as a whole,” not only the virtuous individual; noble rather than servile, they register human beings as bodies and souls together, neither simply animalistic nor purely divine. “The classical philosopher sees himself within the cosmos and within the city.”  As a human being, as a rational animal, he depends upon the “continuity between the human senses,” which we share with animals, and “the knowledge that the philosopher seeks.” As for the citizens who are not philosophers, “the coherence of the political community depends upon the recognition of what is higher and better than the political struggle over rule; that is, it depends upon religion and philosophy.” 

Montaigne, following Machiavelli, demurs. “He sees the tradition as the mask covering over a much different reality, the mastery of the weak by the strong,” as “the idea of the common good” amounts only to what he calls a “pretext of reason” to ‘justify’ “the dominion of masters over slaves.” Also with Machiavelli, he charges that philosophy and religion alike are powerless to prevent this exploitation. “Modern philosophy is ashamed of the weakness of premodern philosophy, dismissing the leisure it commends as mere idleness, the topic of one of Montaigne’s essays. “Montaigne makes leisure appear frivolous and vain,” mere “play.” Leisured men don’t really contemplate the divine; they only amuse themselves with imponderables, doing nothing to bring the justice they tout into the world as it exists. “When Montaigne retires to his study to write his essays, he makes a new world. He overcomes the foundational distinction between actions that are ends in themselves and actions that produce effects by transforming the philosophic act itself into the act of philosophical invention that brings the new world into being.” He anticipates Marx, aiming “to change the world, to master nature, not simply to know it,” by “becom[ing] free in a radically new way,” detached from nature and tradition” by means of “self-consciousness”—a notion not to be found in premodern or ‘ancient’ philosophy. Self-consciousness brings us to see “that we are Christians because we happen to have been born in a country where Christianity was in practice” and that the conscience (the Christian predecessor of consciousness) amounts only to the rule of local customs over our souls. In his essay, “Of Custom,” Montaigne announces his disgust at the flimsy foundation of custom. The title Montaigne chooses for his book is exact: rather than bowing to custom, the philosopher must “essay himself,” rid himself of “this violent prejudice of custom,” tearing away “this mask” in order to restore himself to “a much surer status,” the acknowledgment of himself as himself, cleansed of the spiritual tattoos inked onto his mind by philosophic and religious doctrine. “Reflection is always the mind returning to itself.” In observing the “wanderings” and “flutterings” of his own mind, Montaigne sees that it must be “brought under control” by deliberately forgetting what it has been taught by tradition and what nature itself has imposed upon it. He begins to engage in a new form of knowledge, “a new science, the science of the subject.” The subject he sees in this act of detachment is puny, in need of reordering not of conformity to the inadequate natural order. “When the mind forgets itself as formed by the tradition, it becomes conscious of itself as the origin of philosophy, its own act.” It frees itself, “generates itself” as a phenomenon separate from nature: this is the philosopher’s freedom, “his own act, the act of becoming self-conscious.” The philosopher thus astonishes himself; astonishment at this act of self-generation, this freedom from nature and God, replaces the traditional philosophers’ wonder at nature and God. Having ‘made’ himself, he has no reason to wonder, inasmuch as “we do not wonder at what [we] produce,” having produced it ourselves; we are instead astonished that we didn’t set out to do any such thing. Montaigne is “an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher, the man who happens to be the philosopher, in whom and through whom philosophy becomes conscious of itself.”  

No longer will human beings find equality in their equality before God, which is an equality whereby “we are all slaves,” slaves to tradition, powerless. “Reflection originates in dissatisfaction and shame over our powerlessness: reflection is rebellion against God’s omnipotence, and this rebellion is human freedom,” the “original sin” whereby “the natural human self can be annihilated, not by divine grace but by the human will.” “Montaigne is the new Adam, the first man, the new man, not created by God, but brought into being by his own power.” This, Hartle observes, is the origin of “the so-called mind-body problem of modern philosophy.” Aristotle finds the origin of human knowledge in the senses, “proceed[ing] through memory and experience to the arts and finally the sciences”; “the soul is the ‘form’ of the body and is not separable from the body.” Not so for Montaigne, whose radical detachment of the mind, tasked with observing nature, primarily human nature, rejects the idea that the philosopher “remains a participant in nature,” philosophy being “the highest perfection and fulfilment of human nature,” ” a participation in the divine activity of thought thinking thought.” By separating “the philosopher from the natural man,” Montaigne no longer participates, “as the philosopher, in the natural hierarchy” but denies such a hierarchy, judging it a pernicious myth. “The philosopher, removed from the hierarchy, stands before the pieces, which are now in no essential order,” malleable, ready for reordering in accordance with “the choices of the human will.” As for Machiavelli, “the freedom of the philosopher [is] to impose a new order upon human beings and the human world,” standing “in a relationship to nature of mastery and judgment, not of participation and contemplation.” This “makes modern science possible.” The modern scientific experiment is itself an ‘essay’—an attempt, a project, a trial, a test. The modern mind no longer measures itself by being but subjects being to itself, “to the human will.” “Judgment looks at the contents of the mind in light of what it wants,” and it wants “not man as he is but a new man,” a man who replaces God as the lord of nature, having freed himself from the illusion of natural ends, freed to bring “the new out of the mind itself.” In the words of Machiavelli, this is the ‘effectual’ truth.” [1] With modern philosophy in hand, man need no longer be ashamed of himself before God, nature, or himself. “Man is no longer the being who stands in wonder and awe before the created world and its Creator. He is now the self-creating being who, standing in astonishment of what he himself brings into being, declares it to be good.”

With “the replacement of contemplation by judgment,” natural, divinely ordained hierarchy disappears, since “ranking now comes from man himself.” “Values are relative to the human will; the good ‘in itself’ is not.” This begs the obvious question: “How does he know what the good of man is without an ‘external’ standard, without the standard of something higher than man?” How do men know “how to enjoy our own being rightly”? The answer is that Montaigne “can claim that his judgments are true because he has no self-esteem” while he nonetheless loves himself. By self-esteem he means “the desire to rise above the human,” as seen in the Homeric phrase, “godlike Achilles” and in the Biblical teaching that the perfect Man is actually God. Self-esteem is what causes the traditional distinctions between theory and practice, leisurely rule and servile work, master and slave, the saved and the damned—distinctions that lead to war. By abandoning the self-esteem of previous philosophers, Montaigne can no longer justly be accused of self-interest, by others or by himself. He is perfectly “willing to appear weak and common,” even though he is neither. The high subjects itself “to the low, the strong to the weak,” in an “overturning of the Aristotelian order.” The new civic order, held together by civility, imitates the old order by “setting up a nonhuman authority to which all can submit on equal terms,” but it departs from that order by its origin in human beings. The rule of reason, representative government, the rule of law, freedom of the individual “to pursue the good as he sees fit”: all these are human artifacts that prevent one set of humans to master another. This form of rule is human but impersonal, whereas the old form of rule claimed to be inhuman, originating in God and nature, but was in fact both human and personal, tyrannical. There was no consent of the governed, only the false consent of those duped by the smarter and the stronger. Hence (and here Hartle cites Benjamin Constant on the difference between ancient and modern politics), “the principle of ancient constitutions is the regime,” whereas “the principle of modern constitution is representation,” which is “the separation of rule from human beings.” “There is no place for honor or glory in simply doing the will of others”; ergo, “the principle of representation takes the honor out of rule,” deflating the claim to rule by honor-loving aristocrats. 

Hartle is skeptical. “The price of this freedom is the submission of all to the absolute power of the new monstrous and unnatural master,” the modern state, which Nietzsche calls a “cold monster.” The state wields “absolute power,” at best permitting civil society its realm of freedom, of privacy, the way of life Montaigne portrays in the Essays as his own way of life. In civil society, men pursue what they all have in common, not the ‘high’ aims of aristocrats but the ‘low’ aims of workers. Philosophers conceal their own decidedly ‘high’ activities behind the privacy granted to all individuals in civil society. In his relations with his fellow citizens, the new, Montaignian philosopher is Mr. Nice Guy. [2] Civil society may be “the association of equals” but it is not by that token a community—an association of persons gathered under ruling persons, a ruling person, much less a ruling Person. In his self-love, absent of self-esteem, Montaigne models the life of an independent man. There is no personal rule and there is no overarching common good. Montaigne urges, “Let each one seek the good in his particularity.” Much of his particular good will be ‘in common’ in the sense that everyone needs to survive physically, and everyone wants to enjoy ‘personal freedom.’ Otherwise, you are free to live happily on your own, belonging to yourself—not to God, not to the polis.

“Civility is the way in which individuals who belong to themselves conduct themselves toward each other in civil society.” Hartle identifies “authenticity” as the current-day term for self-ownership. In exchange for preserving his authenticity, for the freedom to make himself “to be what he wants to be,” “his own project,” each member of civil society enables all others to preserve theirs by speaking and acting civilly towards them. No quest for “recognition or honor from those among whom he lives” occurs because none is needed or wanted. Hegel understands this, calling “the right of subjective freedom” the “pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age.” He ascribes the origin of this right to Christianity, although Montaigne obviously disagrees, ascribing it rather to himself, with a nod to Machiavelli. As for an actual Christian, one recalls Paul the Apostle: “For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, an if we die, we die to the Lord. So then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s (Romans 14:7-8).

On the contrary, saith Montaigne: “There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a form all his own, a master form” (“Of Repentance”). This precludes evangelizing in the Christian manner. “Because I feel myself tied down to one form, I do not oblige everybody to espouse it, as all others do” (“Of Cato the Younger”). In so saying, Hartle remarks, “Montaigne has freed himself from the common error of presumption,” judging “each man as he is in himself, not by the common measure of form and final cause.” While the ancients said, “Strength rejoices in the challenge,” members of Montaigne’s civil society find their principal virtue in le règlement, which Hartle translates as moderation but which has a strong suggestion of lawfulness, consistent with Montaigne’s valorization of the rule of law. Although the man with a “self-ordered soul” may appear weak “because there is no struggle or difficulty in his actions,” he has a hidden strength, an inner strength that comes from having identified and followed his own natural form. He naturally feels passions but he governs them readily by identifying them at their beginning, when “all things are weak,” gives vent to them, blows off their still-unimpressive steam, and diverts any vicious passion into some other, milder, passion; he thus needs no rational mastery over them, no self-rule in the classical sense, because he has dealt with them as soon as they appear. That is, Montaigne’s civility ‘goes all the way down’ to the management of the soul. Civility is much more effective than the attempt to reform, the attempt to “correct the world’s moeurs by new opinions,” as the Protestants were doing, an approach that “reform[s] the superficial vices” while leaving “the essential ones” intact. “Authenticity means just being what you are, not what you should be” according to someone else’s opinion. Discovering the possibility of living authentically was difficult; Montaigne himself needed to clear his soul of centuries of what he took to be intellectual and moral slag. Once discovered and suggested to others, authenticity becomes much easier—indeed, life becomes a matter of “Montaigne’s famous nonchalance.”

“The Essays are the first act of self-conscious civility,” which “is the bond among those who do not need each other for the good life.” Taking “the fragments of the shattered world of classical-Christian civilization” and giving them “a coherent philosophical foundation,” Montaigne carefully uses materials that are “already familiar” to his readers in order not to argue for this new way of life but to provide what a later writer would call a sentimental education “at the deepest level of unreflect moeurs.” “Civility is the moral character that keeps society depoliticized,” that limits politics, the realm Montaigne, agreeing with Machiavelli, takes to be a struggle for mastery in which opinions are deployed as weapons against the weak-minded. The tutor of the young gentleman will “form the will of his pupil to be a very loyal, very affectionate, and very courageous servant of his prince, but not to attach himself to that prince by private obligation, an attachment that impairs one’s freedom.” Like Montaigne, he will be a mediator, trusted by all factions even if (necessarily) attached to one of them. “Montaigne does not allow his entire will to be possessed and commanded by his service to his prince: he is a man of integrity, and he belongs to himself.” While Machiavelli recommends eliminating ‘the great’ violently, leaving no one between prince and people, Montaigne would eliminate them nonviolently or, more precisely, not exactly eliminate them but transform them into persons who no longer aspire to greatness, to mastery. As for the people, they will be freed by “freeing the realm of work and labor from its hiddenness and shame and freeing the worker and the laborer from his subjection to the requirements of the common good within the hierarchical structure of the tradition, so that each is free to pursue the go in his own way,” albeit under the impersonal “new master,” the state. Civil society will be free because free from political struggle, “the conflict between masters and slaves, strong and weak.” The social bond is no longer a shared purpose but loyalty to one another, under law, a law crucially supplemented by civility, which “covers interactions where the law does not reach.”

And what of those who are neither princes, gentleman-aristocrats, nor ‘of the people’? What of the philosophers? “Philosophy is barely visible in the Essays.” (What current-day professor of philosophy would recognize Montaigne as a philosopher?) “Philosophy must be hidden as merely unpremeditated and accidental, as sociable wisdom, because nothing can appear to be higher than the prince and because the philosopher must participate in society as an equal.” Not Aristotle’s serious leisure accompanied by prudent political counsel but “play,” the “play of possibility, the freedom of the mind to bring the new out of the old” animates him. Playfulness or sociable wisdom, the mask of civility, disguises “the philosopher’s natural superiority.” Nothing must jar with the civility of civil society, lest “the natural conflict between masters and slaves” recur. 

Montaigne’s project enjoyed considerable success, although not nearly as much as he and his fellow ‘liberals’ would have liked. Increasingly, civil societies in even the liberalized modern states have repoliticized. Liberalism’s old enemies—monarchism, church establishment, titled aristocracy—have declined, only to be replaced by ‘ideologies’—communism, fascism, progressivism. “Ideology is an attempt to reconstitute a coherent whole to replace the tradition in which man is ordered to the divine”—typically called ‘ideals.’ “Ideals are not naturally given ends.” Rather, “ideals are creations of philosophy” (and that’s being kind). Without “natural limits,” they lend themselves to “becoming and change,” to what one ideologue called “perpetual revolution.” In the United States, presidential candidates have even campaigned on the one-word slogan, “Change,” without bothering to specify what change they had in mind, aside from replacing the incumbent with themselves. Ideology is ‘totalizing’: it “radiates into every sphere of life…replac[ing] religion and rul[ing] over philosophy and even family life.” Ideologues enact restrictions on political speech, lest someone else get a word in edgewise. They also police speech in the classroom and throughout university campuses; “there is perhaps no other institution that has become more thoroughly politicized than the university.” This defeats the “defining purpose” of the university: “to pursue truth,” whether or not that pursuit, or the truths discovered offend someone.  “Current intellectual trends would have us believe that there is no such thing as truth and that ‘everything is political’—the political being defined as the exercise of the will to power.

Clearly, Montaigne would want to short-circuit any such thing, just as he would stifle unwholesome passions in their cradle. But he does define politics as the exercise of the will to power, and that is the source of the problem. Whereas Aristotle defines politics as ruling and being ruled in turn, reciprocity in rule; whereas the medieval universities instantiated the balance between faith and reason, Church and state, Montaigne precludes that dimension of what Hartle has called “the tradition.” He depends on civility to pervade, and to continue to pervade, social life, including education. 

Hartle argues that as “a human philosophical invention,” civility only conceals the will to power. Not only modern politics but modern civil society is saturated by the will to power, the ambition to master nature, “the mastery that belongs to God alone.” This is why “civility has to fail.” It “originates in the destruction of the very conditions that make it possible,” or, more exactly, it erodes the shards of tradition Montaigne put together to make it. “The suppression of honor and religion results in the disappearance of any public acknowledgement of the necessity of the higher things.” If my “natural form” happens to be that of a tyrant, and I can find a sufficient number of followers whose “natural forms” happen to be slavish, I can invent an ideology to justify my ambition to seize power.

 As a faithful Roman Catholic, Hartle blames the Reformation and the early modern philosophers for the rejection of tradition, for failing to foresee that their projects would end in the eventual rejection of Protestantism and early modern philosophy, too. She remains aware that the tradition had its own problems: “It might be objected that religion is not the social bond that remains above politics but rather the cause of political conflict,” inasmuch as Machiavellianism and Protestantism both reacted against serious deficiencies within Christendom. To this, she replies that the Church was, and is, already “a multicultural society and arguably the only possible multicultural society” because (unlike Islam or the secular ideologies) it was founded as a movement of evangelism, not enforced domination. She concedes that Thomism, blending as it does Christianity with Aristotelianism, could no longer persuade even the devoutly Christian Pascal, who “broke with the Aristotelian hold on metaphysics, science, and politics” as firmly as Montaigne and Descartes. “Pascal’s view of politics is indebted not to Aristotle or Aquinas but to Saint Augustine.”

But is Augustinian political thought adequate? To be sure, it clearly distinguishes the City of God from the City of Man. But does it give an adequate account of the City of Man?

As Pierre Manent sees, “Pascal sees clearly the social, emotional, and intellectual constituents of the modern revolution being put in place.” Unlike Montaigne, he finds a place for Christian guidance in modern life, distinguishing between those Christians “who aim to make the political laws as conformed as possible to the teachings of Christianity as they understand them” and those “who leave the political order free to organize itself according to its nature, and honor it as such, instead of disdaining it.” But Pascal shares with Montaigne (and Augustine) “a conception of law and of custom that regards human beings as commanded or governed, and not as commanding or governing.” In their corrupted, postlapsarian nature, human beings “want to govern,” driven by libido dominandi, with the few and the many striving to defeat one another. With Montaigne, he considers the arguments each side makes in its own favor to be mere rationalizations. Thus “the human legislator is incapable of reaching the root of injustice”—original sin, seen especially in “self-love”—and “human laws cannot do more, as it were, than scratch the surface of our injustice.” Pascal concurs with Aristotle’s call for a ‘mixed regime,’ one that balances the wealthy few and the many poor, but he denies that either side has any reasonable claim to rule, whereas Aristotle affirms that both sides do. “From a certain date,” Manent observes, “Europeans abandoned every idea of a universal criterion of human actions, of a natural law or natural justice capable of guiding the legislator.,” holding human reason “incapable of discerning the human good, the good that counts for man a man.”  [3] Neither Montaigne nor Pascal can give much assistance, there.

 

Notes

1. See “Machiavelli’s ‘Effectual Truth'” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
2. See “Mr. Nice Guy” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
3. Pierre Manent: Life Without Law. Paul Seaton translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020, pp.166-175, 234 n.15.

 

Robert R. Reilly (with Jens Laurson): Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016.

 

Arnold Schoenberg’s compositional method of “twelve-tone serialism” or dodecaphony, whereby all twelve notes on the chromatic scale are sounded equally in the musical equivalent of democratization, came to dominate twentieth-century symphonic practice. But even from its beginning in the 1920s, dodecaphony struck some composers as indeed too cacophonous. And while the avant-garde composers and concert hall directors eschewed beauty for what they took to be “the pain of truth” and the cult of ugliness, with a nod to Nietzsche, the world wars, and state-sponsored mass murder, registering the loss of the religious faith that inspired previous music, a few but slowly more numerous composers resisted. “I have long suspected,” Reilly testifies, “that there is a hidden history of classical music during this period that would one day surface,” and so it has, in this book. 

Much of it consists of an alphabetical listing of the dissidents, whose compositions and compositional ideas he describes with maestro verve and knowledge, in what amounts to an anti-Voltairean musical Encylopédie. (Anti-Voltairean it is, inasmuch as the “loss of faith” in Christianity, not human catastrophe, best explains much of artistic modernism; after all, as he remarks, the Black Death destroyed a greater portion of human life in Europe during the middle of the fourteenth century than did the violence of the twentieth.) But he begins by contrasting classical music generally with Schoenberg’s. 

Classical music theory began before Christianity, with Pythagoras in the fifth century B.C. He discovered that musical sounds register precise mathematic ratios. This in turn comported with his theory that number is “the key to the universe,” which is a true order, a cosmos, whose “ordering principle” was musical. Musical—that is, ‘of the muse,’ intelligible, with “a reasoning intelligence behind it,” an intelligence discernible by lesser human intelligence. The Pythagoreans “supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number,” Aristotle writes, the ‘music of the spheres.’ Man-made music imitates the cosmic music. More, this teaching could animate ethics, as “music could induce spiritual harmony in the soul,” itself a part of the natural order. In his Republic, Plato quotes Pericles’ adviser, Damon of Athens, who taught that “modes of music have a more decisive effect on the formation of the character of citizens” than even the laws. Accordingly, just as musical concord could harmonize souls, discord could distort them. These themes were taken up by Cicero in his own De republica, then by the Christian St. Clement of Alexandria who, in his Exhortation of the Greeks, averred that “the New Song is Christ, Logos Himself.” As late as the twentieth century, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius could insist, “There is music in the whole universe”; “I believe that there are musical notes and harmonies on all planets.” “That is what I call God,” and “the essence of man’s being is his striving after God,” with musical composition being “brought to life by means of the Logos, the divine in art.” When Reilly listened to Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, “I wept for joy.” The title, Surprised by Beauty recalls C. S. Lewis’s coming to Christian faith in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. As the distinguished late composer and music critic, Robert Simpson puts it in The Symphony, defending tonality against serialism, “the coterie of 12-notery,” “the human sense of tonality has been many times modified”—the choral music of medieval Europe is not Bach’s, nor is Bach’s Beethoven’s—but cannot be abolished.” It comprehends discord (“these poor notes we sing, discord needs for want to grace them,” a lyric poet wrote) but that is the point: it is more comprehensive than dissonance. If anything, Simpson’s music reflects, as he puts it, “with that part of our mind which coldly observes itself no matter what disturbances, mental or physical, occur”—a Stoical answer to the shattered nerves of the serialists. At his best (Reilly cites his Symphony No. 11), his music registers “spiritual calmness,” an “almost ruminative” tone. Rumination, thought: logos.

Reason thinks in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction, not egalitarian mush. “The hieratic role of music was lost for most of the 20th century because the belief on which it was based was lost,” the belief not only in the God of the Bible but in the character of the universe as cosmos. Reilly goes further, asserting that “the death of God is as much a problem for music as it is for philosophy”; “if you lose the Logos of St. Clement, you also lose the ration (or logos) of Pythagoras.” This is questionable, inasmuch as Pythagoras hadn’t the slightest idea of the Logos of St. Clement, but it much more arguable that when philosophers “began to try to deduce the first principles of man’s nature through rational analysis” alone (as the English conductor, Colin Davis, put it), it was only a matter of time before analysis devoured logic itself, beginning with all dimensions of logic that are not analytical. [1] Or, as Reilly himself puts it, “If external order does not exist, then music collapses in on itself and degenerates into an obsession with techniques”; “any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes purely arbitrary.” This was understood and embraced by Schoenberg in his emancipation of dissonance. While dissonance “had been used in music before…for the purpose of dramatizing disorder or conveying anxiety,” but “it was never a norm until Schoenberg,” who maintained that “tonality does not exist in Nature as the very property of sound itself, as Pythagoras claimed but was simply an arbitrary construct of man, a convention.” Following the lead of modern philosophers from Machiavelli on, but responding particularly to Nietzsche, that philosophic connoisseur of music, He intended “to demote the metaphysical status of Nature,” “prefer[ring] to command it” than to follow it. Schoenberg’s system replaces nature. In it, “all tones become ‘equal in the sense that they have no discernible relationship to one another.” As he described it, he had “cured” himself of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” This, for Reilly (and not only Reilly) is where the death of God comes in: “If beauty is gone, so too must be the presence behind it.” 

In terms of music alone, so what? The loss of tonality matters because “tonality is the key structure of music,” the effect that “allows music to express movement away from or toward a state of tension or relaxation, a sense of motion, through a series of crises and conflicts, which can then come to resolution.” Atonality is “the language of irresolution.” (No wonder it was popular in Weimar Germany.) “This is not a change in technique,” simply; “it is the replacement of art by an ideology of organized noise,” eliminating the capacity of music “to lift a person up into something larger than himself.” In its way, it is Montaignian, not Platonic or Aristotelian. And it still wasn’t sufficiently radical, sufficiently true to the logic of denying logos. As the Franco-American composer Edgard Varèse saw, why stop at twelve-tone themes? Get rid of pitch, too. And so, in the early 1920s, he composed Hyperprism, which one critic compared to “a catastrophe in a boiler factory.” And even that was not enough, since constructing a bomb and lighting the fuse suggests intentionality. Enter John Cage, who “created noise through chance operations by rolling dice” and similar randomizing moves. In “striving for the nonmental,” sometimes known as the mindless, he made a “metaphysically, if not musically, potent” point: “there is not fixed Nature to music,” or indeed to anything else. He was “methodically maniacal.” As Cage wrote, “Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos”—Yes to life, as Nietzsche had averred. Evidently, in practice this meant that the principle of noncontradiction could get tossed, inasmuch as the music of the nihilist avant-garde was quickly institutionalized, brought into the concert halls, where it ruled programs for the next several decades. Chaos could not prevail without an orderly framework; Nietzsche’s will to power, or some facsimile thereof, prevailed, in spite of Cage’s hopes for anarchism. [2] As Reilly observes, “Cage was fooling himself if he thought he was destroying power; he was destroying order,” which make it possible “for a certain type of power to ascend,” as seen in his “infatuation with Mao Tse-tung’s totalitarianism,” Maoism being (in Cage’s words) “our greatest reason for optimism,” if only “for the moment,” since chaos will grind on to something else, soon enough. [3]

As all of this was happening, doubts arose. Among “the first to turn against” the twelve-tone school of composition was its preeminent practitioner in the United States, George Rochberg, who “found that serialism ‘made it virtually impossible to express serenity, tranquility, wit, energy.” “I am turning away from what I consider the cultural pathology of my own time,” he wrote in 1964, “toward what can only be called a possibility: that music can be renewed by regaining contact with the tradition and means of the past, to re-emerge as a spiritual force with re-activated powers or structure; and, as I see it, these things are only possible with tonality.” Another American composer, perhaps appropriately named John Adams, also rejected both the death of God and the project of Schoenberg, writing that he “found that tonality was not just a stylistic phenomenon that came and went,” like a historical ‘stage,’ “but that it is really a natural acoustic phenomenon,” one that registers “harmony in the larger sense, in the sense of spiritual and psychological harmony.” Reilly comments that Cicero, Montaigne’s bête noir, “spoke of music as enabling us to ‘return’ to the divine region,” as the soul listening to traditional, Pythagorean music ascends from listening to art to listening to nature to listening to God, nature’s Creator.

In this sense, “Schoenberg is really asking for a reconstruction of reality,” the “loss of reality” being “one of the principal features of modern ideology.” “He is Pythagorean in his belief that number is the key to universe,” “not in the ancient classical sense” but in his claim that he “could manipulate reality and reconstitute it on a metaphysical level.” That is “a Gnostic enterprise,” not a musical one, since “anyone who says you shall hear dissonance as consonance because of my system is engaged in reconstituting reality,” as seen in Schoenberg’s dictum, “Tonality does not serve; it must be served.” [4] In a conversation with Igor Stravinsky’s musical assistant, Robert Craft, Reilly remarks that Schoenberg couldn’t finish his masterpiece, the opera Moses und Aron (composed in the early 1930s but never staged until several years after his death) because “he could not understand why Moses was punished for striking the rock a second time.” He refers to incidents related in Exodus 17 and Numbers 20. Moses’ rod was the rod of political authority. Earlier, he had struck the river and turned it to blood. At Exodus 17 he strikes the rock of Horeb, causing water to come out, saving his people, who were dying of thirst. As theologian Charles Henry Mackintosh interprets the passage, turning the river to blood foreshadows Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. The Rock symbolizes Christ himself, out of whose side water flowed, on the Cross, when pierced by a spear. Referring to Romans 6: 9-10, Hebrews 9:26, 28, and 1 Peter 3:18, theologian Charles Henry Mackintosh writes, “the smiting could only take place once; it was never to be repeated,” as “there can be no repetition of the death of Christ.” [5] Later, God tells Moses to take up not his rod of political authority but his son Aaron’s priestly rod not to strike the rock but to speak to it before the Israelites, who again are rebelling because they again lack water for themselves and their livestock. Moses disobeys, striking the rock twice. The water did come out of it; the Apostle Paul understands this as drinking “of that spiritual rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:4). Mackintosh explains God’s punishment of Moses, barring him from entering the Promised Land, as substituting an act, properly a political gesture, for a speech, properly a priestly gesture, a gesture God Himself had authorized. As Mackintosh observes, “A word would have sufficed in connection with the rod of priesthood—the rod of grace.” That is, in God’s response to Moses’ disobedient reversal of the roles God had assigned to him, He punished Moses politically, denying him entry into the land upon which God will establish the Israelites in His regime, while permitting him to see that land from the top of Mount Pisgah, an instance of His grace. [6] When Reilly cites the passages in the New Testament, Craft remarks, “Well, that certainly closes the door on [Schoenberg’s] Moses.” Reilly’s point is that Schoenberg’s atonality and seriality truncates music because the nihilist metaphysic underlying that atonality and seriality truncates reality. His music “was a reflection of the spiritual collapse of Europe.” 

By contrast, American symphonist David Diamond, who complains that audiences listening to many of the avant-garde works are “not really listening to the art of music” but to “the sensation of sound”; this has played out in popular music, too, inasmuch as rock music is very far from Rock music. “Only two great figures hold my spiritual, theological attention”: Moses and Jesus of Nazareth. “These two men are going to be always with us in that vast spiritual sense of what their particular contributions were. And once I bring that together with my musical spiritual force, I think that’s what the future will be in sustaining my own music.” Although Diamond never quite claims that “the great spiritual values in life” are necessarily “religious spiritual values,” he does insist, “Music that does not nourish you spiritually is not music, only aural sensations.” Reilly finds a similar sensibility in the Danish composer, Vagn Holmboe, whose compositional technique, which he called “metamorphosis,” resembles Schoenberg’s twelve-tonism, but with a difference: while Schoenberg is a historicist, a would-be conqueror of nature, Holmboe derives his technique from nature, as seen in the term “metamorphosis” itself, the natural process whereby an organism matures, becomes what it is ‘in full,’ without any human interference or imposition. “The argument from history leads to creation ex nihilo, not so much in imitation of God as a replacement for him—the Nietzschean will to power”; “the argument from nature leads to creation in cooperation with the Creator and to a larger harmony,” since (as Holmbue once said) “cosmos does not develop from chaos without a prior vision of cosmos.” This, Reilly comments, “could come straight from one of St. Thomas Aquinas’ proofs for the existence of God.”

Diamond and Holmbue were not alone. There has been an entire “cycle of practically unknown symphonies and other orchestral works and chamber music” that shows “the twentieth century to have been far more musically interesting and rich than many may have thought.” To be “surprised by beauty” in listening to this music might also lead to C. S. Lewis’s experience of being “surprised by joy.” [7] 

Edmund Burke distinguishes the beautiful, which he associates with the arts of classical antiquity, from the sublime, the supreme example of which is the Cross. To find beauty and joy in the sublime, or more accurately in association with it, is to acknowledge that the road to the rediscovery of beauty is no more pleasant and harmonious than the journey to the Promised Land. As the American composer Benjamin Britten testified, “I’ve discovered that being simple and considering things spiritual of importance produces violent reactions.” Rochberg’s path away from “organized atonality” “involved a great deal of thought, passion, and suffering.” Wounded in World War II, afflicted by the death of his son, Paul, after the war, he found that serial music “was bankrupted by its inability to express grief, love or hope.” “Without any explicitly religious basis for his own beliefs, Rochberg arrived at a hope for eternity in a Socratic way—from experience.” The Nazis sought to erase Jews and Judaism; cancer erased the body of his son. The nihilist dimension of the modern project seeks to erase, to forget, being itself. Against this (and with Plato’s playfully advanced theory of knowledge as recollection), Rochberg stood with “memorability, remembering, remembering, remembering, without which we know not ourselves or anyone, the past, the evanescent present, [and] face only a blank future.” He added, “Modernism has done little to satisfy the hunger for the experience of the marvelous, which is timeless and ahistorical.” In his music, he doesn’t even forget atonality, mixing it with the dominant tonal elements of his compositions, understanding nihilism as part of man’s spiritual experience. Like Plato’s Socrates, but unlike Schoenberg, he understands irony but never lets it take him over. Music “is a way of reaching the ineffable or exorcising the Devil,” someone whom the tyrants of his century, including Jew-hating, God-hating Hitler served even as he pursued the false Exodus, the quest for Juden Frei Lebensraum. [8]

Reilly affirms that “the central fact of history is the Nativity.” La Nativité is the French translation of the title of one of Adams’s operas, which he titled El Niño. “Nothing in his background would have led one to expect that he would turn to religious subject matter,” given what Adams himself calls his “somewhat checkered religious background.” As with many others, Adams approached religion through nature, through the experience of the birth of his daughter: “There were four people in the room, and then there were five.” “Telling the story of birth,” he went on to say, “not necessarily the birth of Jesus, but just the archetypical experience of a woman giving birth—through the words of women—became the generating idea behind El Niño.” The religious dimension of the opera is indeed checkered, as Adams draws not only from the New Testament but the Gnostic Gospels, “approach[ing] canonical Gospels and pseudo-Gospels alike, as if both were enriching myths” as per Joseph Campbell. “Ultimately, this does not work because, in the process, they lose the source” of Mary’s birth-giving, unique among all birth-givings. While Adams’s original title for his opera was How Could This Happen? “the real question is: What happened? Who is Christ?” In his later piece, Transmigration, “one can hear Adams’ spirit straining against the slavery of death, wishing to break its bonds through the exercise of memory and love,” but “wishing does not make it so.” Only the Resurrection does. [9]

Reilly classifies some agnostics and persons of vague but not decidedly anti-Christian belief to the circle of anti-nihilist composers. Among the latter, the Finn, Einojuhani Rautavaara has written “works that are almost embarrassingly beautiful.” “I am not very much for churches and denominations,” he told Reilly, “but I am for the infinite, absolutely,” recognizing that “Western culture, all of it, music and everything, is based on [the] dichotomy of two opposite forces, Greek philosophy and Christianity,” which were “united in the first millennium and became the core of Western culture.” Intuiting that “there are other kinds of realities” or “other kinds of consciousness, beyond rational concepts and words,” he finds in music “a language where we can tell about those other realities almost with exactness without words,” a “language of the angels.” He takes care not to suppose that such a reality, such a consciousness, is angelic in a sentimental way. He knows that Jacob wrestled with an angel, sustaining injury. Similarly, the British composer Gerald Finzi was a specimen of “that special breed of believing agnostic could write sublime, religiously inspired music.” That is, Reilly suspects, Finzi’s several early experiences with death—his father, three brothers, and his music teacher all died before he reached adulthood—may have left him with a grudge against God, blocking any receptivity to faith. “Finzi’s frequent encounters with death easily explain his attraction to the poetry and the pessimism of Thomas Hardy, another English agnostic, many of whose poems Finzi set to music.” Yet even as he “lived under the death sentence of Hodgkin’s disease,” which killed him in middle age, Finzi’s “profound appreciation for and immersion in the beauty of nature” saved him from nihilism. “Beauty was Finzi’s window onto God, his meeting place with him”—if not God in the self-consciously Christian sense, then God in Wordworth’s neo-Platonic sense, “a dim intimation of our immortality.” “The essence of art is order, completion and fulfillment,” Finzi wrote. “Something is created out of nothing, order out of chaos; and as we succeed in shaping our intractable material into coherence, and form, a relief comes to the mind (akin to the relief experienced at the remembrance of some forgotten thing).” [10]

The twentieth century saw the rivalry of the Soviet Union and the United States—a regime of theist socialism against a regime of increasingly secular commercialism. Dmitri Shostakovich, “the first significant Russian composer to have been completely educated under the Communist regime,” found himself “in a state of constant tension with it. The Soviet ruling class “alternately celebrating and suppressed his music, depending on how Joseph Stalin was feeling.” Shostakovich’s 1934 opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsenk District, was a “tragedy-satire” (as its composer called it), set in 1860s Russia. In it, a merchant’s wife murders her father-in-law, who blundered upon her in the midst of a tryst with her lover; for good measure, she murders her husband, too, before being arrested and shipped to Siberia, where “she commits suicide while drowning the mistress of her unfaithful lover in a lake.” (Reilly adds, “And Katerina is the one with whom we are supposed to sympathize.”) Stalin was unsympathetic, calling it “muddle instead of music” and likely suspecting in it a jab at Kremlin infighting or, as Reilly suggests, a pointed lament about Russia, symbolized in the figure of Katerina, “dying in the nightmarish atmosphere of the Soviet Union” in a “mordant morality tale of how unhinged passion becomes if it cannot anchor itself in love.” “This loveless society is drenched in alcohol, cupidity, and lasciviousness,” as “everything is coarsened; everything is false; everything is a lie.” The Soviet regime itself was founded upon an ignoble lie, a “total lie” about “who and what human beings are.” Such dehumanization leads to murder—many murders. And so, while Shostakovich prudently groveled in apology to the comrades, acting as “a good Soviet cultural apparatchik, which included being sent abroad as a musical emissary,” “all was not as it seemed.” “Shostakovich was engaged in secret writing—in the exact way in which political philosopher Leo Strauss defined it, although transposed to the world of music.” Reilly knows this because Shostakovich himself says so in his memoir, Testimony; “he had been speaking in musical code.” For example, he planned his Seventh Symphony, subtitled Leningrad, before the war began, and thus before Hitler’s attack on the city; Shostakovich writes, “It’s about the Leningrad that Stalin destroyed, and that Hitler merely finished off.” When asked about this and other works, “I answer different people differently, because different people deserve different answers.” As indeed they do. But in Testimony he indeed could offer his final testament: “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones…. I’m willing to write a composition for each of the victims, but that’s impossible, and that’s why I dedicate my music to them all.”

“If Shostakovich’s symphonies are tombstones, the 15 quartets are the flowers he lays on the graves,” traces of the life of Russia, “a world that Lenin and Stalin attempted to destroy—the world of the human soul, from which emanate the most basic impulses to sing praise and to dance in delight, which is why we still listen.” However, Reilly describes Shostakovich’s mournful but not despairing last quartet, paralleling Haydn’s The Last Seven Words of Christ on the Cross, as a work of desolation, a “Cross without Christ, or Good Friday without the Resurrection,” Shostakovich having been no Christian. “The people who were responsible for these evil deeds,” the crimes of Soviet Communism, “will have to answer for them, if only before their descendants. If I didn’t believe in that completely, life wouldn’t be worth living.” If the Communists do not answer before God, they will need to answer before the ‘History’ that they invoked as the justification for their crimes. [11]

And the United States? “Despite Hollywood’s attempts to portray our lives as empty and ugly in movies like American Beauty, there is such a thing as beauty in America,” beautiful music that “runs through the nation’s entire history.” As with all American cultural styles, early American music was imported from Europe, but by the twentieth century “those European threads were woven into an American musical tapestry of unique design,” characterized by “strength, directness of expression”—no Hitlers, no Stalins here—an “openhearted yearning, and an element of naïveté.” Reilly considers Samuel Barber an “exemplar of American beauty,” who “gave romanticism a fresh start with his melodic and orchestral genius” as “the composer the avant-garde loved to hate” and the actual concertgoers loved to love. Among these, his Knoxville: Summer of 1915, one of his “Essays for Orchestra,” derives from a short prose poem by James Agee, a “lyric rhapsody” capturing a child’s memory of “the simple sights and sounds of an evening with his family on the lawn before going to bed,” a family for whom he prays, but from whom he will not learn “who I am.” “No, of course they will not, cannot,” Reilly answers, “because your identity is hidden in your Creator, who will show you to yourself when he meets you.” “From the beginning, America’s sense of realism immunized a number of American composers,” including Barber, “against Schoenberg’s ideology,” which “passed through America’s bloodstream without inflict permanent damage,” being “alien to our practical nature” and, perhaps, alien to a people founded on the conviction that their rights derive from nature.

Reilly concludes that “the attempted suicide of Western classical music has failed.” Schoenberg attempted to drive nature out of music with a pitchfork, but it returned. His “systematic fragmentation of music,” the “logical working of out the premise that music is not governed by mathematical relationships and laws that inhere in the structure of a hierarchical and ordered universe, but is wholly constructed by man and therefore essentially without limits or definition” proved quite simply unsustainable. The “spiritual sickness” of the twentieth century, seen in artistic avant-gardism and the political avant-gardism of ‘totalitarianism,’ has weakened. Schoenberg himself inadvertently forced the crisis in his failure to finish Moses und Aron. “What began to emerge from under the rubble”—Reilly alludes to the title of Solzhenitsyn’s book—of “12-tone music back in the 1960s” was a stripped-down form of tonality called “minimalism,” pioneered by John Adams and others, who “have spoken of the crisis through which they passed in explicitly spiritual terms,” the terms of Nietzsche’s assertion that God is dead. “When you make a dogmatic decision like that early in your life,” Adams said, “it takes some kind of powerful experience to undo it.” As the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt explained, “The sterile democracy between the notes” produced by Schoenberg’s method had “killed in us every lively feeling”; life revived in their souls by the exact opposite of what Nietzsche supposes, not by exclaiming “Yes to life” without God but “Yes to life” understood as given by God. As the Pole, Henryk Górecki understood, “God gave me a backbone—it’s twisted now, but still sturdy.” 

 

Notes

1. See Stanley Rosen: The Limits of Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1980), reviewed on this website under the title, “Delimiting Philosophy” in the section, “Philosophers.”
2. Reilly sees in this a playing-out of Rousseau’s “non-teleological view of nature”: “Cage did for music what Rousseau did for philosophy,” and more, inasmuch as he adopted a stance of “spiritual nihilism.” That spiritual nihilism is never far from Rousseau’s thought may be seen in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, discussed on this website under the title, “Rousseau’s Solitary Walker” in the section, “Philosophers.” And, as a thousand or more writers have observed, a certain form of tyranny, seen initially in the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, grows from some, if not all, of the seeds sown in The Social Contract.
3. Maoism, however, was a form of Marxism, which claims that ‘history’ or the course of events does indeed have an order, aiming at a telos, and ‘end of history,’ as the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat replaces capitalism, itself to be replaced, finally, by communism. Insofar as the musical avantgarde partakes of historicism, it assumes that “the history of art is a series of revolutionary stages, political or otherwise, that open onto an ever-expanding horizon of art’s autonomy and freedom.” So far, this is Marx, or even Hegel. But if one removes the historical telos from historicism, then one is left with historical relativism. In Reilly’s words, “if art serves a primarily temporal function, then after that function is served and history moves on, of what remaining interest is the art?” “The revolutionary view of art” under this form of historicism “turns out to be a form of temporal provincialism.”
4. In response, Rochberg recalls that Schoenberg’s friend, painter and fellow avant-gardist Wassily Kandinsky, was an anthroposophist; “all these guys were looking for some spiritual and metaphysical way out of their dilemma” but “they had diagnosed their problem in the wrong way,” attempting to repudiate artistic tradition and “trying to start over again from scratch.” The problem is that “the past refuses to be erased.” In music, “serialism is the denial of memory,” impossible to internalize or to vocalize. “It can’t live in you.” And so, “music remains what it has always been: a sign that man is capable of transcending the limits and constraints of his material existence” not as an act of conquest but as an act of listening to words and harmonies.
5. Charles Henry Mackintosh: Genesis to Deuteronomy: Notes on the Pentateuch (Neptune: Loizeaux Brothers, 1972 [1882]), p. 561.
6. Ibid., pp. 460-461.
7. “Music was sacred to him,” Craft says of Stravinsky; he was “the composer of joy.” And in his interview with the eminent opera composer Gian Carlo Menotti, Reilly cites the longed-for, “joyous meeting” with God longed for by Annina, the heroine of his opera, The Saint of Bleecker Street.
8. Another refugee from avant-gardism, the American composer George Antheil, the self-described Bad Boy of Music, had “stood shoulder to shoulder with his friends Ezra Pound, Picasso, James Joyce, Fernand Léger” in Paris of the 1920s, but after his Ballet mécanique had gone “as far as one can go in [that] direction,” he followed Stravinsky “into neoclassicism.” As a result, while Pound admired Mussolini’s Fascism, Picasso and Léger Stalin’s Communism, Antheil wrote The Shape of the War to Come, “in which he predicted the events of World War II with astonishing precision.” That is, Antheil reconnected himself with reality, in music and politics alike.
9. Redemption of human souls anticipates their resurrection. Redemption by the grace of God became the central theme of Francis Poulenc, “the witty playboy of French music,” who converted to Christianity in reaction to the sudden death of his best friend, the composer Pierre-Octave Perroud in 1936. Poulenc wrote Dialogues des Carmélites, “an opera for those who hate the French Revolution”—Reilly numbers himself among them—recalling the 1792 murder of priests by the Jacobins in a Carmelite convent they had turned into a prison, following Voltaire’s slogan, Ecrasez l’infame. “Two years later, the prayer police caught a group of Carmelite nuns from Compiègne still secretly practicing their vows,” a crime punishable by death. They were guillotined. Poulenc modeled his opera on a screenplay by George Bernanos. The Sisters “die singing the Salve Regina.” (For a careful discussion of Poulenc’s work, see Peter Kalkavage: Music and the Idea of a World (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2024), reviewed on this website under the title, “Does Music Mean Anything?” in the category, “Manners and Morals.”
10. Agnosticism, not rare in modern England, also characterizes Ralph Vaughan Williams. A clergyman’s son but not a Christian himself, Williams “nevertheless imbued his works with a deep spirituality,” his music and indeed his soul having “absolutely nothing to do with the avant-garde. Like Finzi, he loves nature, but unlike Finzi, his music often mourns “the loss of nature” in modernity and registers his anger against that loss. “Anger gives his music sinews that the more meandering pastoral works, despite their charm, sometimes lack.”
11. Similarly, in Latvia, Pēteris Vasks wrote music that (as he said) “tell[s] in eight minutes how beautiful and harmonious the world is”—this, in contrast to the “aesthetic of ugliness” seen in the avant-garde art of his century, consistent with the totalitarian-tyrannical regime that imposed itself on his country from its capital in Moscow. His Cello Concerto, for example, depicts what Vasks calls “the persistence of a personality against crude, brutal power; what totalitarian power did to us, how we are to purge ourselves from this manipulation”—a witness to “the spiritual steadfastness of my people.” He titled first movement of his String Symphony—Voices “Voices of Silence,” the title of André Malraux’s best-known book on art, written in resistance to the historical determinism of Marxist ideology. In Vasks’s symphony, the “Voices of Silence” serves as the prelude to “Voices of Life” and, finally, “Voices of Conscience.”