The World Part 2

To withdraw from the conflict and sheer severity of the Gospel story, particularly the Passion narrative, is to ignore the fact that God has worked through this world to achieve his purposes in Jesus Christ. Any account of the transcendence of the Gospel must come to terms with the fact that God became man, lived a fully human life, and died a violent and horrendous death. Fully transcending the conflict and tension inherent in the human experience –an experience that the Gospel tells us that God fully entered into- comes dangerously close to a Gnostic or docetic account of the incarnation. To remove the concrete human experience of Jesus is to turn the Gospel into a purely spiritualized account that short-circuits a positive doctrine of creation and disregards the very mode in which God has acted salvifically. It is over-against such a view of transcendence that Macmillan’s Passion offers such a robust account of what Jesus’ Passion tells us about the God who became a human being. It is to a particular theology of art and an aesthetic of transcendence that I now turn to in order to show why Macmillan’s Passion is an example of a piece of art that embraces fully the ambiguity and conflict of the incarnation and the world as it exists under God’s action.

In Rowan William’s Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love , the notion that the Christian faith is at odds with a philosophy of art that fully embraces the concrete world in all of its ambiguity and conflict is challenged as to be profoundly misguided. Offering an account of transcendence that embraces the world and its substance, as opposed to escaping or avoiding the concreteness of the given world, Williams engages with a number of Catholic figures such as the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, poet and painter David Jones, and the novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor. Using Maritain’s philosophy of aesthetics and by looking at the particular processes that artists such as Jones and O’Connor go through as they produce their art, Williams offers an aesthetic of transcendence that is “intensely serious, unconsoling, and unafraid of the complexity of a world that the secularist too might recognize…” A primary thread running through the book is the idea that “things are more than they are”, as Maritain has it, and the artist, through an honest reshaping of the world as they perceive it, uncovers and reveals that “more”. Williams takes this “more” as to be intrinsically and “[necessarily] related in some way to the ‘sacred’, to energies and activities that are wholly outside the scope of representation and instrumental reason.” Thus, good art provides a sort of gateway into a dimension that is unable to be perceived or conceptualized with “ordinary” human experience; it transcends the “on the surface” aspect of the world and “‘dispossesses’ us of habitual perception and restores to reality a dimension that necessarily escapes our conceptuality and our control. It makes the world strange.” This, however, does not mean that the world as we experience it is something to be left behind, or spiritualized into a sort of other-worldly stratus of the sacred. Far from it. The world in which human experience takes place is the world given by the Triune God, who out of a radical, self dispossessing character of love creates the world as other, and therefore loves it “ as a work, as a product that is at once dependent and underdetermined, in process of achieving its own integrity.” That being, the artist is free to depict the world as it exists, which is “radically grounded in God, in God’s ‘wisdom’…and just as radically different from God (and hence vulnerable to change and chance).” As creatures that are bound to the otherness and time of the created world, there is the necessity and a freedom of embracing our own identities as creatures and the world in all of its own integrity and reality. As Williams says,

"The most profoundly free action human beings can take in relation to their identity, the action that most fully realizes the image of God, in theological terms, is to elect to discover and mould what they are in the process of ‘remaking’ the world in a love that is both immeasurably different from God’s (because it is to do with the self’s self-definition in history and material relationship). Human making seeks to echo, necessarily imperfectly, the character of God’s love as shown in making and becoming incarnate."

So, the artist working with integrity allows the world to be itself -something which may or may not be what we think it is. This, as Williams has it, is an act of love; a love that attends to what the world actually is, being completely honest and leaving nothing out of sight. Thus, for the artist, an honest vision and a full participation in the concreteness of the given world is what makes possible the uncovering of different dimensions that remain hidden to our “ordinary” perception. This is a vision of transcendence that allows the world to sustain its own integrity, and allows human beings to embrace their very createdness.
Now, this does not mean that the music of a composer like Pärt is to be looked upon as insufficient or even misguided. There is no sense in drawing a line in the sand as to which type of music is preferable or even theologically superior. Art should speak for itself, and theology should always be careful to avoid ideology as it makes judgments on something as abstract as music. In many ways, Pärt’s music, though it has avoided the conflict and complexity that is so much a part of human experience, offers the sort of “uncovering” that Williams is talking about. As Pärt has said,

"Music … exists all around us without the composer, just as the sculpture exists in the rock and the sculptor only releases from the stone. It’s the same with music. You see I take the skin off the potato, and the musician cooks it and puts it on the table. But it was God who made it grow. It’s the same with music: it exists."

Passio, it seems, is an attempt to take the words of the biblical text and let them create their own music through dropping away all that would hinder a “purity” of expression, to “uncover” the spiritual character that is already there underneath the text, and tap into a deeper truth. There are no direct or explicit outside sources or coloring other than a vision of complete transcendence that lets the words of the text speak for themselves. Yet, on the other side of the coin, there seems to be something essential missing, a wholeness that includes a fully human perception of the text, a musical reading of the words that is unafraid to include the concreteness –particularly the humanity of Jesus- of the Gospel’s worldly setting. This is where Macmillan offers a more robust example of an artist who has chosen to embrace and confront the world as humanly perceived and experienced.
As has been shown by the descriptions of the characters and events above, Macmillan’s setting of the text comes out of an understanding of the world that embraces the ambiguity of Jesus’ divinity and humanity, the irony of Peter’s denial and redemption, the severe clashing of powers as Jesus and Pilate come face to face, and the beauty and mystery of the mother-son relationship between Mary and Jesus. He doesn’t attempt to somehow “purify” the text into something other-worldly or metaphysical- or even Johannine for that matter. There is an honesty about the world as paradoxically fallen in sin and violence and redeemed under the death and resurrection of Jesus. It cannot be reduced to categories where everything is clearly separated and visible. It is much more ambiguous than that. (With the frequent juxtapositions and intermingling of conflict and resolution in Macmillan’s music, Augustine’s theology of the saeculum comes to mind.) For Macmillan, a truthful vision of the world must include an engagement with the ambiguity and conflict inherent in the way in which God has revealed himself through the incarnation. Particularly for the Christian artist, to avoid conflict and to avoid the reality of the world is to retreat from the very nature of how God has acted through the incarnation. As Macmillan has said, “The fact is that if history had to be changed, if we had to be changed, then God had to interact with us in a severe way. You can’t have the resurrection without the crucifixion.” The historical person of Jesus Christ is how God reveals himself to human kind, and it is by entering into the narrative of cross and resurrection we are able to see and experience God’s very nature. This is what makes possible a real transcendence that is rooted in God’s truth, revealed through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. The cross challenges everything that the world, fallen in sin and violence, assumes is the way it has to be. It is in holding everything up to the cross that a true knowledge of the world is possible. Passion is an example of a musical work that has been held up to the cross, in all of its severity and tragedy, broken apart (quite literally) by the very narrative that it is setting. It is in holding his music up to and accountable to such a narrative that Macmillan’s music becomes a fitting witness to the Gospel of God’s severe love.
It should be noted, however, that conflict and struggle should not be held up as something necessary or desirable. The act of crucifixion is not what is vindicated by the resurrection. It is not crucifixion that should be the focus, but rather the crucified Christ. In the cross, God does not affirm conflict and suffering as something necessary to his purposes, but rather overwhelms and triumphs over evil through excessive love rooted in radical sacrifice. By engaging the conflict and struggle of the Passion narrative, we see that it is through cruciform patterning and a life tuned into God’s character and action that true love and transformation is possible. By fully entering into the cross and severity of the Passion narrative, Macmillan has pointed to the way in which God has salvifically acted. He has not simply rehashed a text through music or tried to capture a systematic portrayal of John’s Gospel, but has engaged as a human susceptible to the concrete world that God has created, and loved enough to die for. As Williams says of O’Connor’s perception of the world,

"Doing justice to the visible world is reflecting the love of God for it, the fact that this world is worth dying for in God’s eyes. The tightrope that the Catholic writer must walk is to forget or ignore nothing of the visually, morally, human sordid world, making nothing easy for the reader, while doing so in the name of a radical conviction that sees that world being interrupted and transfigured by revelation. The event that disrupts and questions and changes the world is precisely what obliges the artist not to try and recreate it from scratch. Irony is going to be unavoidable in this exercise."

Passion certainly does not make things easy for the listener. Yet in doing so Macmillan shows the world as it is loved by God and how it has been infiltrated and interrupted by God. It is the very severity of Passion- with its tensions, juxtapositions, and resolutions- that witnesses to God’s radical transformative power and subversive action through the disrupting event of the cross.