Bishop Baines and Christmas Music
Dec. 7th, 2009 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeI was irritated into this by a bit of slow news which has been replicated across various outlets: a typical example is http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/6680422/Traditional-carols-are-nonsense-says-bishop.html .
This particular piece shows a C. of E. bishop as (no particular surprise) clueless, lacking context, and fundamentally misinformed.
Before moving to the general argument (which is about the Church as an historical body and the general issues of historicity and Christianity), let's look at some of the specific points.
First and most adrift from reality: Adeste Fideles (an 18th century Latin hymn translated fairly closely in the 19th - none of the pieces mentioned in the article is an actual carol) is not directed even notionally to the shepherds or the magi, but to the contemporaneous body of the faithful. There are two verses referring to them in the third person. The song refers to an interior journey to the nativity, corresponding directly to the custom of the crib visit.
Secondly: "Away in a Manger" (again, not a carol, but a Victorian hymn) may be sentimental (and hardly a favourite of mine, although my seven-year-old daughter likes it) but it commits no solecism with "no crying he makes": rather, this is one allowable interpretation of the orthodox position that Christ was fully human but without sin. You can get to "no crying he makes" in two ways from there: first, by viewing the crying as a result of the alienation from nature which is a result of the Fall; alternatvely, by viewing the lack of crying (and hence lack of troubling his parents) as an avoidance of a negative activity. It is, of course, also allowable to see a newborn crying as nature even in its restored state; but since we have no actual evidence of the dividing line between marred and restored nature the question is open to debate. But the point is that it is open to debate, not automatically excluded.
Finally we come to "Once in Royal David's City", which will lead us into the larger and more general point. It "invites children to be 'mild, obedient, good as he’, which means what, exactly? This sounds suspiciously like Victorian behaviour control to me", Baines is quoted as saying (What is wrong with Victorian behaviour? Well, potentially quite a bit if you're disauthoritarian, but that is for a different post. Also, and more to the point, the thrust of the hymn isn't really Victorian: it's more an anticipation of the peculiarly 20th century (and peculiar) idea of the Holy Family as a model for the modern family; but that is also a topic for a different post.) Of course it has that sort of thrust; this is Mrs. Alexander. The one who wrote "All Things Bright and Beautiful" with its immortal verse
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made the great and lowly
And ordered their estate.
For something like 1400 years, if not more, this was seen as not only compatible with Christian doctrine but part of Christian doctrine (consider Piers Plowman for a moment, or some nice Elizabethan setting forth of the Great Chain of Being). Children were supposed to be deferential just as the third estate ("pays for all") was supposed to defer to the first and second estates.
Now I'm highly unlikely to back this view of society, and I can't say I know anyone who does (although I still know people who expect deference from children just because they are adults). But it is arrogant and parochial to take the view that just because we are in the present that our views are necessarily right by comparison to our precursors; it's just a mask under another form for the Victorian view of Progress and the Whig version of history.
When we edit out bits of hymns or carols which we dislike because they clash with our sensibilities we effectively try to pretend that our way of being Christian is and always was the only way. More generally, and outside the Church, whenever we suppress or downplay part of the past in this way we lose one thread of the overall understanding of the complexity of human experience and of how we got here.
There's been a wave of this, in hymn books and history curricula, for the past few decades. (Percy Dearmer tried to be respectful of hymn and carol writers and generally preserved words intact in The English Hymnal and The Oxford Book of Carols; his successors have not been so respectful.) And don't get me started on historical novels whose point of view characters and other sympathetic figures somehow hold twentieth-century values.
It's important to instill in people the ideas (1) that they should have some humility as regards the necessary correctness of even their most deeply-held conceptions, (2) that because the past is a foreign country you have to make some imaginative effort to understand it, and (3) that it's important to understand history as well as we can, because the present is rooted in the past and because it shines a set of lights from a variety of perspectives on our own understanding.
This is all the more impotant when the arena in question is the Church, whose theological foundations are bound up in the nature of historicity.
We need the full range of Christmas pieces to complement and check each other: the ancient office hymns such as Christe Redemptor Omnium or Veni Redemptor Gentium (note that these tend to downplay the manger in favour of a theme emphasising the theme of descendit de caelis, much as many of the high mediaeval carols tend to focus on the Blessed Virgin), the genuine carols and mediaeval lyrics such as "The Lord at first did Adam make" and Angelus ad Virginem; modern pieces like "Bethlehem Down"; and even the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century hymns which make up the bulk of the popular repertoire.
This particular piece shows a C. of E. bishop as (no particular surprise) clueless, lacking context, and fundamentally misinformed.
Before moving to the general argument (which is about the Church as an historical body and the general issues of historicity and Christianity), let's look at some of the specific points.
First and most adrift from reality: Adeste Fideles (an 18th century Latin hymn translated fairly closely in the 19th - none of the pieces mentioned in the article is an actual carol) is not directed even notionally to the shepherds or the magi, but to the contemporaneous body of the faithful. There are two verses referring to them in the third person. The song refers to an interior journey to the nativity, corresponding directly to the custom of the crib visit.
Secondly: "Away in a Manger" (again, not a carol, but a Victorian hymn) may be sentimental (and hardly a favourite of mine, although my seven-year-old daughter likes it) but it commits no solecism with "no crying he makes": rather, this is one allowable interpretation of the orthodox position that Christ was fully human but without sin. You can get to "no crying he makes" in two ways from there: first, by viewing the crying as a result of the alienation from nature which is a result of the Fall; alternatvely, by viewing the lack of crying (and hence lack of troubling his parents) as an avoidance of a negative activity. It is, of course, also allowable to see a newborn crying as nature even in its restored state; but since we have no actual evidence of the dividing line between marred and restored nature the question is open to debate. But the point is that it is open to debate, not automatically excluded.
Finally we come to "Once in Royal David's City", which will lead us into the larger and more general point. It "invites children to be 'mild, obedient, good as he’, which means what, exactly? This sounds suspiciously like Victorian behaviour control to me", Baines is quoted as saying (What is wrong with Victorian behaviour? Well, potentially quite a bit if you're disauthoritarian, but that is for a different post. Also, and more to the point, the thrust of the hymn isn't really Victorian: it's more an anticipation of the peculiarly 20th century (and peculiar) idea of the Holy Family as a model for the modern family; but that is also a topic for a different post.) Of course it has that sort of thrust; this is Mrs. Alexander. The one who wrote "All Things Bright and Beautiful" with its immortal verse
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made the great and lowly
And ordered their estate.
For something like 1400 years, if not more, this was seen as not only compatible with Christian doctrine but part of Christian doctrine (consider Piers Plowman for a moment, or some nice Elizabethan setting forth of the Great Chain of Being). Children were supposed to be deferential just as the third estate ("pays for all") was supposed to defer to the first and second estates.
Now I'm highly unlikely to back this view of society, and I can't say I know anyone who does (although I still know people who expect deference from children just because they are adults). But it is arrogant and parochial to take the view that just because we are in the present that our views are necessarily right by comparison to our precursors; it's just a mask under another form for the Victorian view of Progress and the Whig version of history.
When we edit out bits of hymns or carols which we dislike because they clash with our sensibilities we effectively try to pretend that our way of being Christian is and always was the only way. More generally, and outside the Church, whenever we suppress or downplay part of the past in this way we lose one thread of the overall understanding of the complexity of human experience and of how we got here.
There's been a wave of this, in hymn books and history curricula, for the past few decades. (Percy Dearmer tried to be respectful of hymn and carol writers and generally preserved words intact in The English Hymnal and The Oxford Book of Carols; his successors have not been so respectful.) And don't get me started on historical novels whose point of view characters and other sympathetic figures somehow hold twentieth-century values.
It's important to instill in people the ideas (1) that they should have some humility as regards the necessary correctness of even their most deeply-held conceptions, (2) that because the past is a foreign country you have to make some imaginative effort to understand it, and (3) that it's important to understand history as well as we can, because the present is rooted in the past and because it shines a set of lights from a variety of perspectives on our own understanding.
This is all the more impotant when the arena in question is the Church, whose theological foundations are bound up in the nature of historicity.
We need the full range of Christmas pieces to complement and check each other: the ancient office hymns such as Christe Redemptor Omnium or Veni Redemptor Gentium (note that these tend to downplay the manger in favour of a theme emphasising the theme of descendit de caelis, much as many of the high mediaeval carols tend to focus on the Blessed Virgin), the genuine carols and mediaeval lyrics such as "The Lord at first did Adam make" and Angelus ad Virginem; modern pieces like "Bethlehem Down"; and even the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century hymns which make up the bulk of the popular repertoire.
