A Glory Gilds the Sacred Page

I'm not that different from most, in at least that most of the music to which I listen I nowadays has but half my attention. Usually there is music of one kind or another when I sit down each evening to write or read. I may pause now and again to concentrate on one thing or the other, but it seems no less natural to me than it must to all the people I see in the bookstore or on the street to hear music even as I shift through the hours. True, I've yet to wear an Ipod, and I've always resented music in a bookstore or on the bus, but at home, when I am not watching television with the husband, I have music, most times. Listening to Bach's B Minor Mass tonight, however, I found I could not do but by doing nothing else. It is too much, of itself, to allow for books, or typing, or even thinking any thoughts but whatever may stray unrecorded through that glorious sound. Bach does this to me, it seems, more easily than any other composer. Choral music, though I love it more perhaps than any other, I seldom determine to just sit and listen to, but that's what I do, when it is Bach. Nothing unusual in this, I shouldn't think. What has set me thinking tonight, now Bach's Mass is done, is how I might love sacred music, and sit through a full Mass with no emotion but an absolute contentment, and yet feel not a suspicion of renewed sympathy with Christianity. How is that possible? Is it?

I was not raised a Catholic -- then again neither was Bach -- but I know enough of the Catholic Mass to know roughly to what I've been listening. One needn't have any more Latin than I do to hear a Credo or an Agnus Dei as entirely familiar, whatever the tune. I did not grow up in a religious household, but I did go to church and Methodist Sunday School when I was little, with my Grandma, and went many years to Bible Camp in the summers. I even had a more serious, if juvenile, conversion experience and was "saved" for some while. Didn't take. Nonetheless, some of this is in me, if just as an American, and an English speaker, and a redneck. Not Latin, and not Bach, obviously, but something. Surely then, my pleasure even in something so perfect as the B Minor Mass can not be so purely aesthetic as to make me forget, even sitting in my nightshirt, smoking a cigarette, in my own chair, that I am, in a sense, in church.

Closer to the music I heard in church as a child, would be the Olney Hymns, some of which, beyond the most famous of these, "Amazing Grace," must surely have found their way, in one form or another, into the Methodist Hymnal of my childhood. The Olney Hymns were a collaboration of curate John Newton (1725–1807) and his great friend, William Cowper (1731–1800). Newton's name has been the more often heard in the past few years, as attention has been drawn, by recent books and movies, to the early English efforts to abolish slavery. As a reformed slaver, it is Newton's life which offers the more obvious drama. An admirable man, and an important figure in history, he is however far less interesting to me, and far less agreeable company, than his friend, the poet, William Cowper. Cowper's poetry I read first, I think, because Lamb did. Cowper I came to read more seriously, and to genuinely like, not so much because of his religion, obviously, as in spite thereof, or so at least it would seem.

Reading even Cowper's most reverent biographers and critics, there would seem to be some consensus on this point. Though always religiously inclined, and of a obvious mental frailty, it was only after Cowper first lost his reason entirely and was, for some time confined to a madhouse after no less than three attempts at suicide, that he withdrew from the world, and settled into a quiet an contemplative life in the country. The poet's religious practice thereafter was of a stringent Protestant Christianity; fundamentalist, Presbyterian, and sadly gloomy, at least in theology. Many critics I've consulted have made a point of blaming, among other religious influences, Cowper's friendship with Newton for the not infrequent recurrences of the poet's madness, which most often expressed itself in a crushing conviction of his predestination for Hell.

I have sadly had the chance to contemplate more than one friend and relation trapped in such grim and irrational convictions. Judging from my own observation, I would hazard a guess, though with no other foundation, that religion provides not the motive, but only the means most convenient to frame whatever Hell it is in which the mentally ill most often seem to find themselves. What other explanation can encompass for the sufferer such unmotivated exhilaration and despair, if not the direct influence of the supernatural? My dearest friend, when suffering from the advancing depredations of a then irreversible illness, for some time, and in the end, almost constantly felt himself in communication with God, demons and angels. He found little comfort in this, believe me. I do not say the secular critics are wrong in wishing Cowper had been spared the torments he envisioned as his inevitable fate as a "sinner," bound for hellfire and damnation, but I have met more than one unfortunate, free entirely of religious scruple, no less bedeviled by a conviction that they were being persecuted by some power less abstract perhaps, like the government, or their neighbors, but no less ridiculous.

Cowper's faith, for good and ill, is as inextricably a part of his character as is the Christianity in Bach's sacred music, it seems to me. Reading now not only Cowper's poems, which by no means are entirely to do with his God, or his demons, and only now Cowper's wonderful letters, I am struck by just how much I find myself coming to genuinely love the man. How and why should I come to love William Cowper then? Is it in spite of his religion? Is that truly possible?

Reading the letters Cowper wrote to a small but uniformly kind and fiercely loyal circle of friends and mostly distant relations, I find I can not but credit the religion the poet shared with all the nearest and dearest of his friends with some measure of both his their shared contentment. Cowper's letters are uniformly cheerful, nearly all to do with the simplest incidents and occasions in what was an intentionally simple life; his garden, borrowed books, the quiet amusements among humble company, an accident involving his neighbors, when their horse shied coming home from a fair and, the couple being bakers, a trail of gingerbread was left the length of the village street. Cowper's dearest friends, the widow and family of a clergyman with whom Cowper came to live the rest of his life, were as devout as Cowper, but no less cheerful for that. The widow, Mrs. Unwin, though only seven years Cowper's senior, came to be his constant and chaste companion, almost a second mother to him, and kept not only what she could of his sanity for him, but saw to it he had warm socks and good meals, and a home, so long as she was able. Other friends, from aristocrats to cobblers, contributed to his maintenance through the years, and saw to it, when Mrs. Unwin herself succumbed to illness that left her unable to provide for herself and her friend, that neither starved. When the poet's best friend did die before him though, he declined once more into a sad and inescapable sorrow, from which he never emerged again.

Can I read Cowper without his Christianity then? No more than I can listen to Bach and not hear his God. This does not mean that I am likely to believe as either man did. I don't find that I need to. Perhaps this has more to do with my age than any lessening of my own conviction. Chesterton claimed that "Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions." Again I find Chesteron wrong, bless 'im. Oddly, I find myself agreeing with, of all people, Friedrich Nietzsche, “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” As I grow a little older, I find I need not always agree with a person to like them, or dislike them them because we disagree. I can for example still be quite fond of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, even though I know he said and believed a number of foolish things, as well as many clever and wise ones. Conversely, I like Nietzsche no better because I remember the statement above for being not only well said but true. So it seems to me now, reading Cowper, or listening to Bach, I must acknowledge the meaning of their faith, but I need not share in it to take their company, or admire their works.

Now the next question for me is, can I read sacred poetry as I listen to sacred music? Can I, for instance, read such poetry aloud to an audience, much as an atheist might sing Bach, without endorsing the religion such poetry is meant to express? Milton I might, most obviously, were I inclined to take up Milton, and Cowper too, since I could easily read 'round the poems he addressed directly as a Christian, though some of his best are, I think, religious. But can I endorse the beauty of a line without communicating either the poet's faith or my own utter lack of it? Dr. Johnson's prayers, to draw another example, are quite moving to me as a reader, knowing what I know of the great man, and Johnson's prayers are, I think, among the most beautiful of his compositions, if for no other reason than their obvious sincerity and simplicity. Could I read one of these aloud and not feel compelled to explain away either what Johnson intended or I might in wanting to share such a work with an audience?

We shall have to see. I think the experiment an interesting one, if only to me, but then so many of my hobbyhorses seem to sit only me. November seems to me the perfect month to make just such an experiment. Perhaps I will, perhaps I will.

Anyway, even if, as seems likely, I am talking now to no one but myself, there might be someone listening...