The Light of Faith in Sound, Part I: A Lutheran Introduction to Bach

It seems as if everyone who fancies themselves a devotee of the high arts wants to claim J.S. Bach as their own. Without fail, Christian intellectuals and apologists of all theological persuasions routinely cite him as a shining paragon of a Christian artist who used his gifts to their fullest potential, and whose music is capable of leading us toward an appreciation of the dynamic beauty and order of God Himself. Some even go so far as to assert that Bach's music can lay open the Gospel to the skeptical or uninitiated. Nancy Pearcey, in speaking of a "Bach school of apologetics," relates how conductor Masaaki Suzuki, in leading performances of Bach's music in Japan, was able to inspire prayers, Scripture searching, and altar calls in audience members in one of the world's most secular nations. Conversely, many who claim to be "spiritual but not religious" find in Bach a gripping metaphysical power that stirs lofty thoughts and feelings of the highest order, even if they are unwilling to associate these with the specific dogmas ascribed to by Bach. On the other side of the spectrum, Bach is often held up by secularists as a pinnacle of human achievement whose genius transcends the religious milieu of his time. Evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Stephen Jay Gould declared that if he could only send one human artifact to outer space for alien civilizations to encounter, he would send Bach's Mass in B Minor, which is "the best thing humanity has ever done." Similarly, Friedrich Nietzsche—perhaps more than any other thinker the one singlehandedly responsible for making atheism fashionable—called Bach "divine" and said that the St. Matthew Passion was a source of "immeasurable astonishment" to him, calling it the purest presentation of the Christian message that he knew.

Anyone who has spent even a little bit of time listening to Bach's music knows that it is of a different caliber than all other music. Those who are musically trained delight in the almost incomprehensible intellectual fecundity of the unassuming provincial organist, court composer, schoolteacher, and choir director who crafted fugues of such structural and harmonic complexity that no one has ever matched them. Yet even the average listener detects a confluence of mysterious qualities that beguiles, disturbs, invites, tantalizes, and delights; even if they have no idea of what is going on in the notes. The J.S. Bach listening experience is at once lucid and logical, poetic and pragmatic, bountiful and sparse, packed with the deepest thoughts and the most accessible emotions, the most unreachable cosmos and the most immediate experiences. Bach is the Shakespeare of music; one who contributed so much to our understanding of what could be done with organized sound that it is almost literally unfathomable to imagine music history without him.

But unlike Shakespeare, whose religious inclinations remain frustratingly ambiguous, his life shrouded in uncertainty, and his artistic credo nonexistent outside of his works themselves, we know quite a bit about Bach's convictions and the overriding philosophy behind his work—so much, in fact, that they often become a source of embarrassment to those who do not share them but wish to exalt his music as a unique treasure of human production. It is simply not plausible to wave off Bach's Lutheranism as an insignificant component of his artistic temperament, or to claim that his employed service to the Lutheran church is incidental to a full appreciation of his music. Why would a nominal or disinterested Lutheran make a habit of signing all of his compositions, both sacred and secular, with "SDG" (Soli Deo Gloria, "to God alone be the glory")? Why would someone who didn't affirm the meaning of the texts on an intimate level devote so much lavish, unreasonable care and attention to building towering edifices of polyphony on familiar hymn tunes, expounding seemingly superhuman energy in the effort to elucidate every last strand of meaning in the process? Why would he have written tremendous stacks of music on chorale tunes and liturgical texts that were not demanded by his employment duties?

The inseparability of Bach's oeuvre from the theological milieu of Lutheranism means that to examine his work apart from its status as a contribution to the Lutheran tradition is to rob ourselves of the music's profoundest dimensions. It is to divorce our understanding of his compositions from Luther's statement that "except for theology there is no art that could be put on the same level with music." Bach's music is a unique artistic gift to the world, yes—those of all persuasions have recognized that. But they are, first and foremost, intended as a unique gift to believers in Law and Gospel, the Five Solas, and the Lutheran Confessions. In this short series, I want to offer a paradigm for how Bach's music should be viewed through Lutheran eyes: as a creative engagement with the theology of Luther and the Confessions and a prime model for the serving of God and one's neighbor through the artistic vocation. I also hope to demonstrate along the way that Bach's name should occupy a pivotal position in the Great Tradition of classical education alongside such other cornerstone artists of Western civilization as Homer, Plato, and Shakespeare.

Any understanding of Bach's Lutheranism must begin with the importance of hearing to Lutheran practice in catechesis, the Divine Service, and sanctification. It is by means of the ear that the invisible certainties of the faith are conveyed most effectively. When we hear the inspired Word spoken in the Service, we take it in as delivered by the ordained representative of Christ. Even if we already know the passage by heart, there is something uniquely mysterious and essential to our beings when it is given to us in auditory fashion rather than the more passive process of reading. Hearing enforces the prerogative of the Christian to walk by faith, not by sight. There is a natural connection from this to the primacy of music, the only art form whose medium is not tangible. When discussing a work of visual art, a film, or a theater production, it is easy to analyze the "forms" that meet the eye. In the realm of literature, the task becomes more abstract because we are now dealing in the realm of pure imagination, where the physical medium of paper is not integral to the art itself, but is only a means of delivery. But when it comes to music, we must rely purely on sense perception to describe our impressions. To be moved by music is ultimately an act of faith, for we trust that what we hear embodies an objective order that is just as real as nature itself, even if we cannot physically touch or glimpse it. Even the pagan origins of classical education acknowledged this. Plato and Aristotle viewed music as a means by which our souls may be ordered through perception of the invisible logic of the cosmos—an idea that was to be taken up in the Middle Ages, as music was considered a branch of the quadrivium along with mathematics, geometry, and astronomy. This is yet another area where Luther seized upon the best aspects of medieval culture and theology and returned them to their proper source in Scripture.

Luther singled out the great polyphonic composer Josquin Des Prez as the finest musician of his day, marveling at his ability to match astonishing technical virtuosity with moving and sincere illustration of liturgical texts. Today we recognize Josquin as second only to Bach in terms of polyphonic mastery and emotional expression; the Lutheran tradition certainly had a precedent for admiring rich craftsmanship and deep pathos in music. Jeremy Begbie relates Luther's exaltation of music to his high regard for the potential of matter to be sanctified and used as a medium for the most profound truths and to inspire properly directed emotions. When viewed through the transfiguring lens of the Gospel, material creation should be embraced and used for the leisure of man and the glory of God. For the baptized Christian who believes that God took on our flesh to reveal Himself as He truly is, that worldly vocations are "masks of God," and that He gives to us His real flesh and blood at the altar as guarantees of our identity in him, the world of the senses can serve as a glorious testimony to abundant grace. In this way again, Luther's understanding of music was much closer to that of the ancients and medievals with their love of the "harmony of the spheres" and the invisible, mathematical music of the universe than how music was to be understood in the Reformed tradition of Zwingli and Calvin, who looked upon it as just another human invention that could be used for edifying purposes in limited measure but was largely base and corrupt. Since so many core Lutheran doctrines—the theology of the cross and the Sacraments chief among them—are due to a strong emphasis on the Incarnation, the eyes and ears of the Lutheran Church have never been impoverished by a lack of visual or auditory beauty. 

With a robust theology of music as a Spirit-given medium for ordering the mind and the affections toward worship, the Lutheran tradition could produce top-notch composers who communicated texts of utmost doctrinal rigor and devotional intimacy with music of equal beauty and strength. If we are to see Bach as he really was, we must view him primarily as an heir of the venerable line of Lutheran hymnodists and liturgical composers which included Schütz, Praetorius, Nicolai, Crüger, Buxtehude, and, of course, Luther himself, who supported his musical theology with a robust founding canon of hymns which set the great texts of the liturgy and catechism to adaptations from Gregorian chant, folk song, and some original tunes. Bach, like Luther, viewed himself as a servant of the Church, not as an intrepid creator forging his own path. In his inexhaustible canon, Bach worked out to its fullest extent Luther's theology by means of his musical principles. Whether or not Bach read Luther at length (and there is evidence that he did, since he had a rich home library), like any Lutheran raised by devoted parents, he was immersed in the tradition and its doctrines from his earliest memories, and he probably had the entire hymnal lodged in his soul by the time he reached his teenage years. His lifelong project of arranging and interpreting the Lutheran chorale canon, both in the cantatas he wrote for almost weekly performance in the Divine Service at Leipzig's St. Thomas Church, and the organ pieces he forged in his spare time, was not intended solely for his personal edification. Any Lutheran who knows the tunes and their connections with the church year would view these works as a gift. For Bach builds upon the assumption that all of his listeners know the melodies and the texts typically associated with them. His works are acts of love toward the Lutheran community who shares his love for these great treasures of worship. When he writes a fugue or aria on one of these tunes, he assumes that everyone in the room speaks the same language as him. He can use this common starting point to reach them with art that both upends their expectations and brings them home to what they knew all along.

In the next installment, we will further examine Bach's use of chorales as we introduce the structure and terminology of his church cantatas. We will introduce the context for their composition, along with Bach's artistic and theological framework for these works.

Davis C. Smith is an MA student at Hillsdale College's Graduate School of Classical Education. His research interests include aesthetics, hymnody and liturgics, the Western literary tradition, the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem; and the theology of Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard. His work has been featured by the Sigma Tau Delta Review, Voegelin View, and the Consortium for Classical Lutheran Education.