Missa Solmenis

Who's going to the sacrifice: The lamb of God or just more lambs?

I went to mass last night. Well, kind of: Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis  is far more enjoyable than any mass I have ever been to. Did I miss the point? Are you supposed to enjoy mass? I mean, isn’t enjoyment of mass idolatry? I went for the music; for the wall of voices, for the lead violin melody in the Sanctus, supposedly marking the ascent of the spirit of Jesus to heaven after  the resurrection. Perhaps it’s idolatry – I loved the music rather than the God it celebrates – but wasn’t it parasitism, too? I mean, Beethoven would never have written such beautiful music if he hadn’t actually believed that there was a God , would he? In going to this concert, taking pleasure from it without returning the faith that sustained the work that created it was I freeloading, stealing?

I don’t know, but taking that argument to its logical conclusion, I could just as easily argue that non-believers should be banned from attended concerts such as that one. Maybe there should be restrictions on who can and who can’t go to performances of Missa Solemnis because if you let atheists in the door then ,eventually, there may not be any more music like that.

As I listened I was reminded of that old cliché – the devil has all the best tunes – and I thought of how wrong that was. God has some pretty good stuff, too. If Beethoven had not intended his music to enjoyed as music, for it to appeal to infidels then why did he make it so beautiful? I have the dimmest memories of what it’s like to be at an actual mass but the one impression I have is of the mind numbing tedium of the experience. If God had ever wanted his message to be delivered directly he would never had invented Beethoven. I think He loves idolaters.

The last section of Missa Solemnis is the Agnes Dei. I suppose it’s a sacrifice for God to let Beethoven take the credit for what is, after all, His gig – mass. The sacrificial nature of language has been in my head a lot recently; how it is that in order for certain things to have meaning, to have presence,  to be in the centre, others things have to babble into meaninglessness, disappear and fly to edges. I guess what I find really puzzling about Christianity is this tendency to allow, to demand sacrifice. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, who grants us peace.

I struck me that this is exactly why the refugees from the Syrian and Iraq wars are going to Europe; because they know that at a fundamental level in the Christian tradition there is this openness to the stranger – that the most privileged will sacrifice their privilege in the interests of justice and of love. These people are going to Germany and not Saudi Arabia because they believe that the Christian God may just allow, or may even demand idolatrous devotion. I wouldn’t want to practise idolatry under Sharia law.

Then again even the most superficial view of history tells you that only a fool would look to Germany in hope, and so, this is a really partial view of European traditions. Christianity may preach love your enemy, but, in its relations with the Orient, with Africa, with Asia, Europe has more often than not sacrificed everything in its way. There has been very little Christianity in how Europe deals with non-Christians; there are people alive tonight who’ll probably be dead in a few hours thanks to the British, American, French or Russian air raids.

I don’t know, this part of the world (Europe) has a lot of blood on its hands, there are a lot of dead bodies in the foundations of the building of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. And yet, the message of the new testament – to love your enemy, to sacrifice the most powerful (the son of God!) to save the vast masses – is at odds with the facts. It must seem to outsiders that Europeans often do not practice what they preach. There’s an apparently forked tongued babble of love and hate that must infuriate those on the outside.

 

The killings in Paris last month show how that fury can manifest itself, and yet that obscenity reveals the limits of the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism. The very openness that allows an idolatrous experience such as my enjoyment of Beethoven, such as Beethoven’s plagiarism and indeed, improvement upon God, is the openness that makes it easy for a dozen killers to massacre over a hundred innocents in the streets. Ironically, it’s also the openness that people fleeing the Middle East seek.

It remains to be seen as to whether the barbarism that sustains European civilisation can be changed because that is the real threat to that civilisation. The military thuggishness and economic greed of America and Western Europe helped create the problem in the Middle East – jihadi fundamentalism is just a more technologically primitive version of the same viciousness.

Going to Beethoven last night reminded me of why non Europeans love and hate Europe. I suppose it also reminded me of the need for courage. Without courage, a morality of openness to the alien, to the enemy, a morality based on love and sacrifice of privilege and power can be a fatal weakness. But without that morality there can be no Beethoven, there can be no lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, to grant us peace.