What's wrong with rock music? - Part II
At this point, let us consider Ratzinger’s treatment of music, of the Apollonian in particular, which we find in The Spirit of the Liturgy: “This is the music that draws senses into spirit and so brings man to wholeness. It does not abolish the senses, but inserts them into the unity of this creature that is man. It elevates the spirit precisely by wedding it to the senses, and it elevates the senses by uniting them with the spirit... But then there is the music that Plato ascribes to Marsyas, which we might describe, in terms of cultic history, as ‘Dionysian’. It drags man into the intoxication of the senses, crushes rationality, and subjects the spirit to the senses.”
Looking at this closely, we have another – perhaps a deeper – duality than Apollonian versus Dionysian: that is, marriage versus subjugation. We know that, for the human person, spirit already wants to be as body, just as matter wants to be pneumatized. What could it mean for spirit to subject itself to matter? Is spirit to abide its own submission to the entropic decay of the fall, descend toward instability and the sadness of corruption, locked into a self-seeking a-relationality? Paradoxically, it is precisely the suppression of pneuma that frustrates the self-realization of hyle.
As I pointed out in my last entry, Pieper finds commensurability between Plato and the Christian anthropological schema, and with good grounds to do so. Friedrich Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy, opened up the discourse on the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy to modernity, bringing it through his time into our own day in a definitive way. With Ratzinger, I take Nietzsche extremely seriously. There is no little to admire in his prodigious intellect, jaw-dropping stylistic elegance, formidable work ethic and thorough and systematized thought.
Yet in Nietzsche’s lengthy formulation, the dilemma takes on very dark colors: “In reality, however, this hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, a God experiencing in himself the sufferings of individuation, of whom wonderful myths tell that as a boy he was dismembered by the Titans and has been worshipped in this state as Zagreus: whereby is intimated that this dismemberment, the properly Dionysian suffering, is like a transformation into air, water, earth, and fire, that we must therefore regard the state of individuation as the source and primal cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself.”
The Apollonian is the seeming order in being – and as such but a glimmering dream, cloaked in the Veil of Maya. As its constraints are cast off, men burst forth into the frenzy of the dithyrambic. In the excerpt above, we see a literal exaltation of dissolution into the elements. This Dionysianism is not passion, but a nihilistic fatalism which has ritualized its despair into futility-embracing revelry; these lines, attributed by Nietzsche to “the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus,” express what lies beneath: “Oh, wretched race of a day, children of chance and misery, why do ye compel me to say to you what it were most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is for ever beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. The second best for you, however, is soon to die.”
Where the Teilhardian-Ratzingerian vision I cited in my post on matter foretells the continuing advancement of complexity, this Dionysian vision typifies a contrary de-evolution or dissolution. What is truly suspect, however, is proposing such mania as a path to deindividuation. Any reference to the Seattle grunge scene of the ’90s aside, this kind of dissolute forgetfulness is no nirvana, but a mob frenzy, the madness of crowds.
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Given such a context, the Dionysian, in seeking to discharge man of his individuality, his personhood, effects but a morbid disinhibition whereby he is intoxicated just to the degree of temporary insensibility to the nausea, regret and punishment contained virtually in the authorizing of the id via an irrational conformity. This is closely akin to the single-victim mechanism as described by French sociologist Rene Girard; Girard discusses this mechanism within the Dionysian in his 1984 article “Dionysus versus the Crucified” – which expresses no sympathy with Nietzsche’s conclusions, but tremendous respect for his courage, insight, and integrity. And Girard is, as always, quick to show the radical refutation of the single-victim mechanism through the glory of the Cross; likewise, as the Dionysian suffering devolves to elemental fire bringing forth the ashes of disintegration, the Igne Amoris is a flame of pure interiority and self-communicating beauty.
Pieper tells us that as one presumes to eradicate the passio amoris, “[b]oth intellectual and spiritual love are smothered...,” and sees in this repression a pathology resulting in “the intolerance, harshness, and rigidity frequently found in men who seek to lead a ‘spiritual life’.” One might contend that Nietzsche’s contempt for what he sees, however unjustly, as a bloodless Socratic cleverness, is not unrelated.
More importantly, Ratzinger can clearly see this as well. In the essay “On the Relationship of Structure and Content in the Catholic Faith” he is quite wary of “the root of what the French have labeled the maladie catholique: one who wants to live only on the supernatural level...”
What is truly interesting is that the above quote from Ratzinger immediately continues “...and to the exclusion of self.” The Dionysian and the maladie catholique are, at base, surprisingly similar; temperance, sophrosyne, like any of the virtues, carries deficient and hyper modes which mutually caricature one another. It is precisely individuation as person – and for man, to be person is to be person as soul and body – which calls forth gift, transcendence, joy and beauty. In his famous work on the cardinal virtues, Pieper brings forth that “the primordial divine mode of temperance... is the ‘turning of the Divine Spirit to itself’.” The creative impulse is conceived only in genuine self-possession, and it is only there that it can be received. Abnegation of self is fatal to art, just as it is to spirituality.
So, as Nietzsche himself makes clear, what is problematic in the Dionysian is not its vehemence. Let us look, then, to the criteria which Ratzinger lays out for music specifically, again from Spirit of the Liturgy: “If we want to know whom we are dealing with, the Holy Spirit or the unholy spirit, we have to remember that it is the Holy Spirit who moves us to say ‘Jesus is Lord’ (1 Cor. 12:3). The Holy Spirit leads us to the Logos, and he leads us to a music that serves the Logos as a sign of the sursum corda, the lifting up of the human heart. Does it integrate man by drawing him to what is above, or does it cause his disintegration into formless intoxication or mere sensuality?” While here the intended application is liturgy, it also lends well to universal norms. Ratzinger is absolutely aware that Logos is also sarx.
Note also that Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, was daring enough utterly to recast the notion of eros in the context of an encyclical (although John Paul II had already done much to pave the way); it should seem rather obvious that a similarly redeemed mode of the Apollonian-Dionysian dyad is anxiously awaiting definition. As the Church increasingly engages both global and secular culture, perhaps this is needed, now more than ever. Indeed it was Ratzinger, in his Message to the Communion and Liberation Meeting at Rimini, who pointed to Plato’s Apollo as “absolutely no longer sufficient.”
Every piece of music I cited in my previous post has, for me, checked all the boxes, exactly as Ratzinger himself has specified. Music of the Ignis Amoris does not – and indeed cannot – do other than affirm Logos and lift up the heart. Where this fire, personal expression and technical mastery converge, I find, actually, an apex – as in the concert I attended. For Nietzsche, the Apollonian is no more than reverie, because peace is an illusion. Where exuberance can be let to be with no injury to right order, there is a kind of light which engenders peace.
All of the songs I chose – and I chose them only because I love them – have an unusual degree of spiritual content. To be sure, spiritual content can never manipulate art. And yet, as we all know, there is a mode of self-forgetfulness which (unlike Dionysian oblivion) is virtue; love drives one to cast aside the artifice so protective of the ego, and the calculation that so serves it. Vehemence in art is perhaps uniquely equipped to foster both creation and performance at the very depths. Pope Francis has counselled artists that the role of art is “to put a thorn in the heart.” It is under the influence of this ecstatic quasi-affliction, perhaps, that the abandon of true beauty has always occurred, just as David, a type of Christ, danced before the Ark.
I cannot know how Pope Benedict XVI might evaluate this post, nor what exposure he had to music lying beyond his personal affinities. He remained steadfastly leery of St. John Paul’s participation in a concert by Bob Dylan – and, to be fair, to interpret Dylan’s admonition from his classic “Rainy Day Women,” that “everybody must get stoned,” as referring to the Acts of the Apostles seems likely apocryphal, however complex Dylan’s relationship to religion and spirituality has been. But that concert, among many others, did in fact take place. Gianfranco Cardinal Ravasi, then President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, paid public tribute to David Bowie at the musician’s death; Pope Francis himself has released a prog-rock-inspired devotional album (confirming the suspicion that Bergoglio’s genius is more pastoral than musical, though we have weighed its merit as an alarm feature). African drumming adorns beautiful, reverent Masses, on the continent itself and wherever immigrant communities gather; on our own continent and even among the ethnic community in our own locale, Danza Azteca troupes bring their art and energy to Masses honoring our Lady of Guadalupe. It seems a shame to have mere cultural drift, while neglecting the great riches of theological resource that call us to truly understand.
Just in closing, for now (more on this topic will come soon), I was told that the concert I described in my previous post had been performed the night before with flamenco dancers. I cannot imagine that as anything less than a prophecy of the glory and dignity, dynamism and destiny of creation.