Sunday Night Journal, February 11, 2018

I've listened to Beauty Will Save the World (the album by The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus), several times now, and I like it a great deal. It may not be everyone's cup of tea. It's certainly not a pop music album in any sense. The description I quoted from Wikipedia a couple of weeks ago is pretty good. Here it is:

The group's music is a blend of folk and sacred music, industrial and ambient sounds, and samples that has drawn comparisons to neofolk artists like Current 93 and Death in June, as well as artists including Dead Can Dance, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Henryk Górecki, and Arvo Pärt.

But if you don't know those artists the description won't help much. I don't know about their other albums, but from what I've heard of Death In June, which is not a whole lot, that comparison doesn't much fit with this one. Most of it is not songs, exactly, but assemblages of music and other sounds, as the Wikipedia entry says. It begins with a recitation, in Spanish, of St John of the Cross's "Dark Night" ("noche oscura"), which fades into wordless singing. Rather than continue trying to describe it, I can suggest that you listen to this track, which begins with a setting of what I think is a translation of a (the?) Compline liturgy; I've heard it before but I can't think where. I could do without that sort of blubby bass sound, but apart from that I think this is gorgeous. 

The album seems to be out of print in solid physical formats. Amazon says "temporarily out of stock" but the group's Bandcamp page says "Sold out", which sounds rather final. But you can buy it in MP3 form at Bandcamp, which I did, along with two other albums, The Gift of Tears and Mirror. I haven't listened to either of them yet. I wonder if the CD or LP versions would have any sort of what we used to call liner notes. If they do I'd be tempted to buy it again just to get that, because I have some questions about what I'm hearing. But then the group seems to like remaining mysterious and letting the work speak for itself.

The cover picture is of Simone Weil

Simone_Weil_1921(image from Wikipedia)

which is an interesting coincidence, because I've been thinking for some weeks now that I'd like to read her again. I have a Simone Weil Reader which I bought back in 1980 or so and read a fair amount of at the time, but can't recall even so much as opening it in the years since. As you probably know, she was a somewhat eccentric (it's hard to avoid the word) religious and political thinker, born Jewish, later a sort of Christian, having what she said was a direct encounter with Christ, but refusing baptism, believing (on what grounds I don't remember) that she was somehow called to remain outside.

I picked up the Reader one day last week and browsed in it a little. Much of it is taken up with her social and political thought, and at a glance I found that rather turgid. Then I flipped over toward the back and found things like this:

If God had not been humiliated, in the person of Christ, he would be inferior to us.

All that I conceive of as true is less true than these things of which I cannot conceive the truth, but which I love. That is why St. John of the Cross calls faith a night. With those who have received a Christian education, the lower parts of they soul become attached to these mysteries when they have no right at all to do so. That is why such people need a purification of which St. John of the Cross describes the stages. Atheism and incredulity constitute an equivalent of such a purification. 

That's what I feel a need to hear right now–the hard stuff, uncompromising and apophatic. I think she is frequently mistaken, but in ways that are illuminating.

*

You may have seen a news item (here's a link to one) about the Episcopal diocese of Washington DC adopting a resolution which calls on the diocese to

…eliminate, when possible, all gendered references to God and to replace them with gender neutral language, and if necessary, to alternate gendered titles when referring to God.

I don't understand why this was considered newsworthy, as Episcopalians have been talking this way for at least forty years now. I mention it only because it got me to thinking about exactly why this sort of thing is wrong. The first response of more or less orthodox Christians, including me, is "But Scripture says…", "The Church says…", "The creeds say…" And that's all true. But there's a more fundamental problem with the sort of liberal or modernist or progressive theology that calls for changes like this one. It's the assumption that we have a right to make such changes if and when we feel the need. This rests on a misunderstanding of the foundations. 

Obviously there are changes that can and should be and have been made over the centuries, and obviously there will always be a vast amount of space for our understanding to grow. But the most fundamental fact about Christianity is that it begins with a revelation. Its central doctrines are not the result of particularly gifted people thinking about God and coming up with interesting and useful answers, or approaches to answers. They were given and revealed to us, not created by us, or even discovered by questing human minds. ("Discovered" until maybe the late 18th century or so meant more or less what we mean by "uncovered," which is sometimes amusing–you get things like "he discovered the bed.") Accepting that they are a revelation is an essential part of accepting that they are true.

I think maybe that's the fundamental mistake of modernist theology. It's not that its ideas are necessarily always wrong, but that it doesn't understand or accept the conditions under which specifically Christian theology operates. There is plenty of room around the peripheries for argument as to what is part of the revelation and what is not, but the references to God as Father and Son are too clear and frequent to be considered separable and optional. 

*

Note the second sentence.

FrankBrownLives

 

 

41 responses to “Sunday Night Journal, February 11, 2018”

  1. There are a few copies for sale on Discogs but they’re stupid expensive: $200.00+

  2. Yeah I saw similar things from Amazon resellers. You’d think the obvious conclusion for the band would be “make some more”.

  3. There will be an interview with RAIJ in the next issue of Jesus the Imagination

  4. This post is good. More tomorrow.
    AMDG

  5. I really hope the CD is not permanently out of print because the one I have/had in my car has disappeared from its slip cover. Usually when car CDs escape their slip covers they have a very short life span under the seats or under the dogs. When they are recovered they are scratched and unusable. I love this record too.

  6. Agreed on the pronouns thing. It’s not just the Episcopalians – late-20th century Catholic liturgical music (at least the stuff produced in America) has been trending that way as well. I’ve been flicking through our parish’s new hymnal and noticed the more recent songs tend to quietly avoid the divine “he” when talking of God.
    (We have a new priest, returned from America to his native land, bringing with him the Journeysongs hymnbook and an American upbeat optimism. As choir director I need to become familiar with it.)

  7. I’m not real familiar with Journeysongs but I think it’s fairly bad. The name certainly promises as much. I hope your priest wasn’t ruined.
    I grit my teeth at the new songs that are clearly intended to advance the progressive lines. Then I shrug it off. What I really hate is when they change the words of the classics. I don’t think they have the right to do that.

  8. I look forward to reading that interview, Michael.
    I hope your cd isn’t ruined, Grumpy. I have a suspicion you haven’t entirely taken to downloadable/no-physical-object music.

  9. “I have a suspicion you haven’t entirely taken to downloadable/no-physical-object music.”
    Makes two of us.

  10. It’s how I ended up with more music than I can listen to. Not even counting the streaming service which gives me access to most of the pop music that’s currently available.

  11. I have more books than I’ll ever read, yet I keep buying them. I don’t need two addictions. 😉

  12. No, I really don’t like constant ‘streams’ of music. I use Pandora, it is true. But I don’t have my own collection. It doesn’t work for me.

  13. “Streaming” is just the name of the technology–music or movies coming into your house over the internet. “Constant” isn’t part of it, although Pandora’s standard service works that way–like radio. For me listening to something on Tidal is like listening to a cd, only I’m clicking on something from a list on the computer (or phone) instead of picking up a disk. It’s Netflix for music, not like Pandora.
    Rob, are you quite sure you don’t have a CD problem? 🙂

  14. No, I’ve actually weeded my CD collection down by roughly a third, and I’ve cut way back on my buying. For me books are the killer.

  15. “Note the second sentence.”
    Nice.

  16. A ghost, do you think?
    It’s how I ended up with more music than I can listen to.
    Now what is it that makes me think that even before there was such a thing as “downloadable/no-physical-object music” you already had more music than you could listen to?
    AMDG

  17. Hard uncompromising stuff Yes, that is just what is needed.
    I really love that video, Maclin, and I hope I get a chance to spend more time listening to their music. It looks like great Lenten fare.
    That first line from Simone Weil reminds me of something in Death on a Friday. I will have to look it up when I get a chance. It is just that sort of thing in Neuhaus’s book that makes me like it.
    AMDG

  18. Rob,
    I am about halfway through Each Man in His Darkness and it is excellent so far. Thanks for recommending it.
    AMDG

  19. “Now what is it that makes me think…”
    Possibly. But there’s still a big difference in going from having two gallons of beer, to having the contents of the walk-in cooler at a big liquor store, to having unlimited access to the output of all the major breweries and most of the minor ones. I really didn’t acquire that many new recordings from the mid-1970s till the mid- or late-1990s. It was cheap mp3s from emusic that really got the situation out of control. I could get 5 or 6 new albums every month.

  20. And also used CDs.
    By the way, in reply to Grumpy earlier, I was really talking about mp3s–buying, downloading, etc., not the Netflix-for-music thing. mp3s require a degree of involvement with a computer that not everybody wants to deal with, but it was/is very easy for me because I spent most of day in front of one.

  21. I certainly never would have associated Neuhaus and Weil. That makes the Neuhaus book sound more attractive. Truth is I’ve never found his work all that engaging, though I always found his column in First Things interesting.

  22. My CD library is pretty out of control, at around 1000 or so discs, but I rarely buy new ones. Most of the artists I’m super interested in are old, dead, best work is behind them. All of those things help. I don’t have any sort of internet/computer going at my house, so CDs are the only way to get music.
    Like Rob G books are my main problem. If I could bring myself to get rid of many that I’ve read, or look at a shelf and say, “If I bought a book 10-15 years ago and still have not read it, it needs to go!” I find when I do either I then feel the need in the future to buy another copy. I feel like a crack addict, or meth-head when it comes to books.

  23. You’re welcome, Janet. I read that awhile back for Lent one year and it made quite an impact.

  24. Amazon has affected my book buying in the same way as mp3s have affected your music buying. It’s just too darned easy to buy a book, especially a Kindle book (Yes, I know what everyone here thinks about Kindle.), although I buy both, and some of them I will never read, but I’ve been pretty good about reading them, especially the Kindle books because they are always with me. Now I have to really cut back, and it is hard, but necessary.
    AMDG

  25. I’m sure I would do that too except that I just don’t much enjoy reading on the Kindle, which is one of the original types.
    I have at least a few books that I bought 40 or 50 years ago and haven’t read. Many that I bought 10-20 years ago and haven’t read. I’ve often tried to cull them but never gotten rid of more than a few, because I’d always think “Well, I would still like to read it someday–and I might!” I’m becoming a bit more realistic about that as I get older. Also my wife and I have to agree. I’m generally fairly tough about not buying books that I’m pretty sure I would only read once, though the local library is relatively small and inter-library loan is a pain.

  26. Maclin, I haven’t been very impressed with Neuhaus’s work either, and I was not happy with the choice of this book for book club, although the person who recommended it is pretty reliable. I was surprised at how much I liked it.
    AMDG

  27. I’ve increasingly been buying music online and downloading it, but I’m told that this is not how young people access music on the internet.

  28. That’s my impression. They use the on-demand services I was talking about–Spotify and the rest. They don’t care whether they own it or not. The artist or the label or whoever may decide to remove it, but for most people pop music is disposable anyway. They won’t much care if they can’t hear today’s hits a few years from now.

  29. Mac: The priest doesn’t seem too ruined, but he also goes to Africa on regular occasions, so maybe that helps.
    Journeysongs has a mix of old and modern songs, and it’s so bulky you can just ignore everything written after 1900 and still get a lot of use out of it. (My approach is not far from this.) Or you could ignore everything written before 1900 if you liked.

  30. Sounds a lot better than Glory And Praise, which is almost ubiquitous here. Or at least it used to be–now that I think about it, I haven’t seen it for a while.

  31. I certainly never would have associated Neuhaus and Weil.
    I’m slowly making my way through Death on a Friday Afternoon and last night came upon this:

    It simply is not possible to understand the Christian story apart from its placement in the Jewish story. We have been discussing God’s radical identification of his fate with the fate of the Old Testament prophets, and in that identification we have a foretaste, an intimation, of what Christians mean by the mystery of the incarnation.

    I think Neuhaus would have had a problem with Weil’s instead finding that “intimation” among the ancient Greeks, not the Old Testament. She actually abhorred the Old Testament and Israel.

  32. Mac, I know you were talking about MP3s and downloading. I wanted to say: I have never quite figured it out, and I don’t really like it because it seems that you would end up with a long stream – an endless stream rather than a finite piece, like a CD, with a beginning, middle and end. I’ve never quite figured out downloading, and so I stay with CDs. I started to say that, but I thought, it’s not quite true that I don’t like an endless stream, because I listen to Pandora. So then I said, – something like – I don’t like this, but I do listen to Pandora. But the qualification became the meaning of the observation. It took center stage and edged out my main point, which is that I have never got habituated to downloading.

  33. 🙂 Downloading does introduce at least the possibility of a lot of confusion that you don’t have with CDs. You have that intermediate software layer that you have to navigate. If you misplace a CD, looking for it is a pretty straightforward process. Everybody intuitively knows how to look for a lost object. But if you’re downloading an mp3 and it somehow ends up someplace on your computer that your music-player software doesn’t know about–well, suffice to say it’s not as straightforward. On eMusic’s message board I used to see frequent messages along the lines of “Help I bought this album but I don’t see it in iTunes.”

  34. I’m pretty much with Grumpy here. Over the years I’ve downloaded a few things that I couldn’t get any other way, but then just burned them to CD. I find the self-limiting nature of CD’s to be helpful in controlling the desire for over-acquisition.
    To me Pandora, etc., are just expansions of radio, and as easy to use, so I don’t have any objections to them.

  35. I don’t expect to be buying many more CDs partly because I’m almost out of storage space and partly because I don’t see much advantage in most cases to having the physical CD. The only reason to prefer it for me is if the packaging is worth having for some reason, and that’s much less often the case than in the LP era.
    But I also expect to buy fewer and fewer downloads, because the on-demand services have so much of what I’m interested in. Granted, it can disappear at any moment. But I ask myself “How much would it matter to me if I could never hear this again?” and the answer in most cases is “Not all that much.” What really tipped the balance for me was a few months ago when ECM put their whole catalog on the major services. Having access to all that is WONDERFUL. I’d rather spend $10 a month on that than on mp3s. I use Tidal btw–I picked it mainly because they pay more to the artists.

  36. Do you remember when there were dedicated MP3 players. At least, I think that’s what they were. I couldn’t get mine going. I had two or three guys who tried to help me get started with one. Each and everyone of them insisted on putting his favourite song as the starter song. One person actually started mine off with three Neil Sedaka songs. Im not joking. It was horrific. My youngest brother created a starter prologue with all the music from an airshow. He’s in the home guard and I appreciate his patriotism, but its not the kind of music I want to hear every single time I turn the thing on. The Sedaka guy actually made me a list of instructions, because we realized that I don’t use it often enough to remember how to use it between goes. But I never wanted to use it, because of the overture.
    I reckon that now everything that used to be in an MP3 Player is probably in one’s Iphone. But that experience has put me off. I realize I should do it, but I don’t yet feel motivated.
    However, I know that eventually I have to get my GA or some young person to explain this to me and help me start. Because I don’t listen to my CDs half as much as I used to do. I just don’t. But if the music on my CDs was in my phone, I would do.
    So I’m going to go there – I’m not absolutely resistant to it, because I know my CDs are not as much played as they used to be, and I really used to enjoy the music on them.
    In other news, I found the Revolutionary Army disc, and it was not too much harmed. Its got one little jump in it, but then it plays again normally.

  37. Horrific indeed. I would say you were pretty restrained in your reaction if you didn’t throw the thing against the wall or stomp on it. But I’m puzzled as to why the gizmo always started playing immediately, and always the same stuff. I still have (and use) an antique iPod, now probably close to 15 years old, and it only plays what I tell it to play. But now that I think about it, it is pretty easy to cause it to play every track in alphabetical order, so maybe yours was doing something like that.
    I had a Pandora Premium subscription for most of last year–that’s the Pandora variant that lets you pick what you want to hear, instead of the normal radio-like playback. It has a phone app, of course, and one thing I hated about that was that it automatically started playing something when you opened the app.
    I’m glad you found the RA disc. That would be a sad loss.

  38. Finally listened to this after forgetting about it for two months. Very good stuff — the video is actually the concluding scene of Tarkovsky’s ‘Andrei Rublev.’
    CD copies of this are still very expensive ($200+) but RAIJ’s first two albums seem to be relatively easy to find at standard CD/LP prices on both Amazon and Discogs.

  39. Janet — did you ever finish ‘Each Man in His Darkness’? What did you think?

  40. I’m glad you mentioned RAIJ again. I had bought all three albums in mp3 format at the time of this post. But apparently I was so eager to hear Beauty Will Save the World that I forgot to download the other two. Which I have just done. Not sure when I’ll listen to them–I’m overwhelmed with music.

  41. Rob, Yes, I thought it was great. I’m getting ready to send it off to Maclin. I’ve been getting ready for about two weeks now. Unfortunately, it has been buried under a million books because I’ve been moving bookcases and rearranging the books.
    AMDG

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